Voice Control Toolkit Comes to a Pico Near You

Moonshine AI has released a voice control toolkit that runs locally on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, using 3.6 MiB of the 4 MiB FLASH and 468 KiB SRAM. The system integrates voice activity detection, SpellingCNN speech-to-text supporting up to 50 tokens, and neural text-to-speech in a tight memory footprint.

Voice-controlled appliances are nothing new. What might be new, however, is Moonshine AI running it all locally on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W https://github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine/tree/main/micro The voice interface is roughly divided into three parts: voice activity detection, SpellingCNN speech-to-text and a neural text to speech. The speech to text supports up to 50 tokens, and can be re-trained to support any specific words you want. It runs a simple loop: detect voice activity, listen for command tokens, process them in C++, use the TTS to reply, and repeat. Now, to be fair, it is a bit of a squeeze: 3.6 MiB of the available 4 MiB FLASH and 468 KiB SRAM on a stock Pi Pico 2 board. It leaves you with just about enough space to write a small amount of extra software, but it’ll be a challenge to fit anything substantial. Still, fitting three different types of AI model needed to make this possible in such a space is quite impressive.