how is this number useful or comparable to digital codecs that are being discussed here? It's an interesting piece of research sure, but I don't see the relevance

Because voice comms are typically used by hams in disaster response -- you pointed out that LoRa tops out at 140 bits, so I responded that that's still 3X faster than voice.

As explained above, the most efficient voice codecs still need orders of magnitude more than that.

This magical 39 bit codec doesn't exist and probably won't ever exist. Even if it did exist, it loses information like timing, identity of the speaker (how they sound), and their tone. By the time you encode all of that, you'll be right back around the range of dmr. And if you're willing to discard all that, then just use digital text in the first place.

Exactly, don't use the codec and send voice, just send the text directly.

That's not speech then.

If you're talking about compression, Q-codes[1] were invented long before most of us were born.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code

I didn't say it was speech, I was comparing the 140bps data rate mentioned by the parent poster with the 39bps data rate from human speech, and pointing out that even 140bps is well above the data rate possible with plain speech.

Any increase in effective data rate of speech afforded by Q codes can also be used to increase the data rate of data transmission.

And as people keep pointing out, the 39bps figure does not refer to speech. It only refers to a single component of speech, which is the syllables being spoken.

When people are talking, they're exchanging far more information than that at a far higher information density rate. Which is why everyone keeps telling you that what you're talking about is not really speech.

The study you linked is focused on linguistics and the effective 'symbol rate' of various spoken languages, by taking syllables spoken per minute and dividing that by the total number of possible syllables in each language.

It says nothing about how much information is actually exchanged between individuals doing the speaking. It doesn't factor tone, accent, pronunciation, mood, pacing, etc all of which are critical components of spoken communication and add up to a lot more than 39bps.

So when you say 'speech is 39bps and this thing does more (it mostly doesn't), therefore this thing is better than speech'. People keep telling that no speech is not actually 39bps and what you're talking about is identical to just written text in this context.