Modern telecommunication services generally use digital speech encoding. Speech encoding degrades the audio with compression and filters to make the data transmission more efficient. To keep conversations and on-line meetings productive and creative it is important that these digital services do not increase the cognitive load. Measuring effects on working memory is one way to estimate cognitive load of the listener. A test with 25 participants was performed to investigate the effects of using the AMR-NB codec, a standardized codec for mobile communication. The memory performance for spoken 12-word lists was measured and AMR-NB encoded speech was compared with unprocessed speech (LPCM 16 bit, 44.1 kHz). A within-subject analysis showed 9% lower recall rate for the AMR-NB coded speech. © 2018 The Author(s).