If we're talking about wish-lists, encoding performance on low-power IoT devices, maybe? It has decent SIMD support on ARM/x86 and tweakable complexity settings, but if your device is weaker than an ESP32, you'll be hard-pressed to encode audio in real time, even on the lowest complexity.
The new kids on the block in the speech encoding/real time communications space (Google Lyra/Microsoft Satin) have fancy AI models, promise decent quality in ultra-low bitrates (3-6kbps), but don't look like they're any easier to run on micro controller.
How about Codec 2 [1]? I think it delivers a comparable performance to Lyra etc. while not using ML, and has multiple ESP32 ports already. Maybe it might be usable for less powered devices.
The new kids on the block in the speech encoding/real time communications space (Google Lyra/Microsoft Satin) have fancy AI models, promise decent quality in ultra-low bitrates (3-6kbps), but don't look like they're any easier to run on micro controller.