The paper actually lays it out pretty clearly. Yes, you can just pipe 16kHz audio into a tokenizer, which is exactly what they did (kind of). They just treat t

The paper actually lays it out pretty clearly. Yes, you can just pipe 16kHz audio into a tokenizer, which is exactly what they did (kind of). They just treat the input as 8-bit ASCII (which in itself is technically not a thing, since ASCII is 7-bit, but the paper doesn't seem to care about technicalities). So the input alphabet is 256 entries - 1 for each byte. Simple as that.