Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2.

Lyra V2 is summed up by Google as being " a better, faster, and more versatile speech codec...a new architecture that enjoys a wider platform support, provides scalable bitrate capabilities, has better performance, and generates higher quality audio. "

Lyra V2 makes use of the SoundStream end-to-end neural audio codec, continues showing much better performance than the Opus audio codec, improved audio quality, and more. The Lyra V2 open-source code is available today.

More details on Lyra V2 can be found via the Google Open-Source Blog and the code is available on GitHub . The GitHub release notes mention Lyra V2 can be ~5x faster on Android devices, codec latency reductions from 100 to 20 ms, and now there is Mac and Windows support to complementing the Linux and Android support.