Oído: Open-Vocabulary Speech Recognition on a $5 Microcontroller without a Neural Accelerator
Speech recognition on low-cost microcontrollers is, in practice, limited to keyword spotting or a fixed list of commands. We present Oído, an inference engine that runs open-vocabulary English speech recognition entirely on an ESP32-S3 (240 MHz dual-core Xtensa LX7, 512 KB of SRAM, 8 MB of PSRAM, 16 MB of flash, no neural accelerator). Oído executes a 13M-parameter Conformer-CTC model with int8 weights, per-frame dynamic int8 activations and int8 attention on the chip's SIMD instructions, with a schedule designed around flash and PSRAM bandwidth. On LibriSpeech test-clean/test-other the on-device arithmetic reaches 3.70%/8.23% word error rate (WER), within 0.12 points of full precision, a...
| Authors | Daniel Varela Sánchez, Guillermo Martín-Coello Juárez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 9 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 October 2026 |
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