Waveforms are continuous by nature, so they can't be divided into separate units like a sequence of text can be split into words. That's why the feature vectors are passed to a quantization module, which aims to learn discrete speech units. The speech unit is chosen from a collection of codewords, known as a codebook (you can think of this as the vocabulary). From the codebook, the vector or speech unit, that best represents the continuous audio input is chosen and forwarded through the model.