Oído — Whisper-tiny-beating ASR on a $5 microcontroller
Open-source speech recognition from the Lokutor team: NVIDIA Conformer-CTC Small (13M params, int8) running on an ESP32-S3 with 8MB PSRAM — no GPU/NPU — beating Whisper-tiny.en on LibriSpeech and under real noise.
Why it matters
Brings usable speech recognition to $5 hardware — two orders of magnitude cheaper than the laptop-class hardware Whisper-tiny needs — opening always-on voice interfaces for appliances, toys and remotes.
What you could build with it
A hardware startup or indie hacker could build always-on voice remotes, smart switches, or children's toys that understand speech fully offline at BOM cost under $10.
Does it hold up?
Too early to judge — WER numbers are author-reported; no independent reproduction on ESP32-S3 hardware published yet.
Built with Oído
- r/LocalLLaMA release thread (183 upvotes)reddit · Subreddit activity tracker confirms the I-Built-A-Thing thread for Oído in the latest cycle; Lokutor team members answering questions in comments.
Learn more
First spotted on github: source.
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