Digital Speech Standard (DSS) is a proprietary compressed digital audio file format defined by the International Voice Association, a co-operative venture by Olympus, Philips and Grundig. DSS was originally developed in 1994 by Grundig with the University of Nuremberg. In 1997, the digital speech standard was released, which was based on the previous codec. It is commonly used on digital dictation recorders. Modern phycoacoustical codecs that perform nearly as well at only slightly higher bitrates have led to this speech coding standard being less used in modern voice recording equipment.

This format is free, which apparently is one of the reasons for its popularity. The used codecs supports variable bit rates (as a default), and .ogg files usually play back easily on all platforms. All things being equal, the sound quality exceeds that of mp3 somewhat.