After reading vidarh's comment below ("The biggest challenge with evaluating all of these, is that once you've listened to a comprehensible version of one of these samples, they all sound more intelligible."), I recommend trying to listen to the Lyra version first, then listen to the original next. It actually does sound very strange when you don't have the true audio parsed in your head already. I'm not sure if I would like having to do the extra work to translate this in my head on every conversation.

It's more apparent in the video example from the Google post, I won't spoil it but there's a word that starts with B that sounds very funny in the Lyra version (listen to that one first): https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-...