A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 kb/s Using LPCNet

This is a follow-up on the first LPCNet demo. In this new demo, we turn LPCNet into a very low-bitrate neural speech codec (see submitted paper) that's actually usable on current hardware and even on phones. It's the first time a neural vocoder is able to run in real-time using just one CPU core on a phone (as opposed to a high-end GPU). The resulting bitrate — just 1.6 kb/s — is about 10 times less than what wideband codecs typically use. The quality is much better than existing very low bitrate vocoders and comparable to that of more traditional codecs using a higher bitrate.

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