Oído Speech Recognition Outperforms Whisper-tiny on $5 Microcontrollers
September 30, 2026
Oído uses a 13M parameter NVIDIA Conformer-CTC Small model to achieve 8.4 mean WER in noisy environments on an ESP32-S3. This outperforms Whisper-tiny.en on a laptop, running entirely on a microcontroller without a GPU or NPU.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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builderYou can deploy high-performance, low-cost speech recognition to edge devices with extremely limited compute.
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healthThis enables the creation of cheap, always-on medical monitoring or assistive devices that process audio locally.