Re:Silly Image Compression Idea
by Dylan16807 on Sunday April 10, 2022 @09:06PM
(#30983429)
Well there's already speech-oriented codecs that can go down below a kilobyte per second, and there's this one that throws a neural net at the problem to help squeeze bytes: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neu...
I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. You need packets to be making it through in a timely manner if you want a voice conversation, after all.
> I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that.
I _may_ still have a 300 baud modem in a box in the garage. Possibly a 1200/75 one too. (1985 sometimes doesn't seem _that_ long ago...)
Re:Silly Image Compression Idea
by Dylan16807 on Monday April 11, 2022 @04:04AM
(#30985938)
Well, you could have just talked on the line that modem was using. That's not really the kind of limit I'm worried about.
There are speech codecs that essentially do this but with a phonetic encoding, instead of "normal" text.
Yes, they are only used for extremely bandwidth-starved situations, but they do work. An example is Codec2, which works down to 0.7 kbit/s.
Re:Silly Image Compression Idea
by matthewaveryusa on Sunday April 10, 2022 @09:42PM
(#30983623)
Great idea! In fact look at what nvidia is doing with videocalls (spoiler exactly what you’re saying, but video)
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc...
You could fine tune some existing text to speech model to sound like you. Once you transfer that to your friends/frequent contacts you could have voice conversations over very low bandwidth channels.
There are obviously plenty of caveats to this, like communicating sounds that aren’t speech. It could be a useful fallback e.g. if your network quality is seriously degraded then your client switches to TTS mode.