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Open-vocabulary speech recognition runs on $5 microcontroller

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

Researchers have developed Oído, a novel system enabling open-vocabulary English speech recognition to run on a low-cost $5 microcontroller, the ESP32-S3, without requiring a dedicated neural accelerator. Oído achieves competitive word error rates on benchmarks like LibriSpeech, outperforming the chip's native recognizer and even matching some full-precision laptop models. While not yet real-time, the system demonstrates the feasibility of advanced speech processing on highly constrained hardware, with code and models made publicly available. AI

IMPACT Enables advanced AI capabilities on extremely low-power, low-cost edge devices.

RANK_REASON Research paper detailing a novel system for running speech recognition on low-cost hardware. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Open-vocabulary speech recognition runs on $5 microcontroller

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Research paper detailing a novel system for running speech recognition on low-cost hardware. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Daniel Varela S\'anchez, Guillermo Mart\'in-Coello Ju\'arez ·

    O\'ido: Open-Vocabulary Speech Recognition on a $5 Microcontroller without a Neural Accelerator

    arXiv:2610.13447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition on low-cost microcontrollers is, in practice, limited to keyword spotting or a fixed list of commands. We present O\'ido, an inference engine that runs open-vocabulary English speech recognition entirely on an E…

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