[lifthrasiir]

It is definitely a thing given a good perceptual metric. The metric even doesn't have to be very accurate if the distortion is highly bounded, like only altering the lowermost bit. It is unfortunate that most commonly used distortion metrics like PSNR are not really that, though.

[rini17]

But that's mathematically impossible, to restore signal from extremely low bitrate stream with any highly bounded distortion. Perhaps only if you have highly restricted set of posible input, which online meetings aren't.

[lifthrasiir]

> Perhaps only if you have highly restricted set of posible input, which online meetings aren't.

Are you sure? After all, you can effectively summarize meetings in a plain text which is extremely restricted in comparison to the original input. Guaranteed, exact manner of speech and motions and all subtleties should be also included to be fair, but that information is still far limited to fill the 20 kbps bandwidth.

We need far more bandwidth only because we don't yet have an efficient way to reconstruct the input faithfully from such highly condensed information. Whenever we actually could, we ended up having a very efficient lossy algorithm that still preserves enough information for us human. Unless you are strictly talking about the lossless compression---which is however very irrelevant in this particular topic---, we should expect much more compression in the future even though that might not be feasible today.

[rini17]

Okay, did not know you measure distortion that way.

[lifthrasiir]

If you wonder, that definition is pretty much universal in the lossy compression (e.g. rate-distortion optimization or RDO).