What is "speex"

Speex is an audio compression format designed for speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm. Speex claims to be free of any patent restrictions and is licensed under the revised (3-clause) BSD license. It may be used with the Ogg container format or directly transmitted over UDP/ RTP. It may also be used with the FLV container format.

The Speex designers see their project as complementary to the Vorbis general-purpose audio compression project.

Speex is a lossy format, meaning quality is permanently degraded to reduce file size.

The Speex project was created on February 13, 2002. The first development versions of Speex were released under LGPL license, but as of version 1.0 beta 1, Speex is released under Xiph's version of the (revised) BSD license. Speex 1.0 was announced on March 24, 2003, after a year of development. The last stable version of Speex encoder and decoder is 1.1.12.

Xiph.Org now considers Speex obsolete; its successor is the more modern Opus codec, which surpasses its performance in all areas.