COMPRESSING AUDIO WAVEFORMS USING NEURAL NETWORKS AND VECTOR QUANTIZERS

Methods, systems and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media. One of the methods includes receiving an audio waveform that includes a respective audio sample for each of a plurality of time steps, processing the audio waveform using an encoder neural network to generate a plurality of feature vectors representing the audio waveform, generating a respective coded representation of each of the plurality of feature vectors using a plurality of vector quantizers that are each associated with a respective codebook of code vectors, wherein the respective coded representation of each feature vector identifies a plurality of code vectors, including a respective code vector from the codebook of each vector quantizer, that define a quantized representation of the feature vector, and generating a compressed representation of the audio waveform by compressing the respective coded representation of each of the plurality of feature vectors.