[nullc]

Voice recognition is very accurate on Opus (especially when trained on it). Commentary from an eng at a big voice rec house to me was that switching to opus _improved_ accuracy on their testing.

> There are times when I need 44.1kHz and not 48 kHz, like on an embedded system with everything running at that and no performance left for converting or extra PCM channels

Unfortunately we live in an interoperable world. And there are _many_ devices running at 48kHz without the resources to resample. Your devices would be unable to interoperate.

Being "opinionated" in this way is specifically to accomplish the goal of guarenteeing interoperability in a world with cheap throwaway IoT devices.

> the fact that all major players now have voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana?

You might want to look at how these systems are sending audio...