  Neural networks have proven to be a formidable tool to tackle the problem of
speech coding at very low bit rates. However, the design of a neural coder that
can be operated robustly under real-world conditions remains a major challenge.
Therefore, we present Neural End-2-End Speech Codec (NESC) a robust, scalable
end-to-end neural speech codec for high-quality wideband speech coding at 3
kbps. The encoder uses a new architecture configuration, which relies on our
proposed Dual-PathConvRNN (DPCRNN) layer, while the decoder architecture is
based on our previous work Streamwise-StyleMelGAN. Our subjective listening
tests on clean and noisy speech show that NESC is particularly robust to unseen
conditions and signal perturbations.
