Abstract: A neural network audio codec system and related methods are provided. In one example, a method is provided comprising: obtaining speech audio to be encoded; applying the speech audio to an audio encoder that is part of a neural network audio codec system that includes the audio encoder and an audio decoder. The audio encoder and the audio decoder have been trained in an end-to-end manner. The speech audio is encoded with the audio encoder to generate embedding vectors that represent a snapshot of speech audio attributes over successive timeframes of the raw speech audio, and from the embedding vectors, codeword indices are generated to entries in a codebook. The codeword indices are then transmitted or stored for later retrieval and processing by the audio decoder.