[levosmetalo]

I hope this never takes off.

This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text. Then it can apply all shady practices that it previously was too expensive to do because storing voice and extracting information from it required huge storage costs and actual human labour.

Or worst, just imagine what some government you don't trust could do with all those voice call transcripts.

[mgraczyk]

This codec has nothing to do with what you're worried about. There's no current technical limitation preventing what you're describing. Google doesn't do it because it makes no sense for their business and because your phone calls aren't routed through Google's servers. Governments outside the US are already doing it.

[sreekotay]

I mean...this is them open sourcing it?

[barbazoo]

It sounds more like a "offline" codec, not a Google service compressing your voice so I don't immediately see how Google would violate our privacy here this time.

[DeepYogurt]

> This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text.

Can they not do that with opus?

[rektide]

This will make voices radically more correlatable, most likely. It's a more effective model for voice, it has run endless regressions & found better patterns to model human sounds upon. That could well make processing & comparing pieces of speech data less computationally expensive.

I don't see much relation to surveillance & transcription issues. This technology does not, would not change the field of battle significantly, if such a battle were about. Which it probably is, in some countries, perhaps even applying to Google-touched, -relayed, or Google-held data.