IP telephony communications are conducted by sending both audio data produced by a CODEC that represents received spoken audio input, and a textual representation of the spoken audio input. A receiving device utilizes the textual representation of the spoken audio input to help recreate the spoken audio input when a portion of the CODEC data is missing. The textual representation can be generated by a speech-to-text function. Alternatively, the textual representation can be a notation of extracted phonemes.