Even 3G AMR, I think that was pre 2000 Speech Codec started at 5Kbps. With a latency of only ~20ms. If I am reading correctly the encode due to ML nature would take at least 40ms on Lyra.
I am sure there are some specific usage that would be a great use case. But most consumer consumption I cant think of one on top of my head. One should also be aware of the current roadmap in 5G and the on going work in 6G. We still have a long way to go in maximising bandwidth / transfer per capita.
It seems to be the case ML codec wants to take these speech codec to new low bitrate. While it is fun doing it as a research, I much rather they push the envelop at least 6 / 8Kbps closer to perfection with even lower latency ( 10ms if not lower ).
And as you said, in some situations you do have really low bandwidth available.
A 3g connection on a decade old phone with a low signal strength might only get 50 kbps, but it tends to be bursty (ie. Offline for a few seconds, then a few hundred kilobytes arriving all at once).
That makes it impractical for audio conferencing. It might be useful for streaming YouTube, but for that it would need to be able to encode music and sound effects reasonably too.