Moonshine Micro: Full Voice AI on a 500KB Microcontroller
Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb
I present Moonshine Micro, an open-source toolkit enabling real-time voice interfaces on ultra-low-cost microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi RP2350. This system integrates voice-activity detection, speech-to-text, and neural text-to-speech, running entirely within 470 KB of RAM. By leveraging TensorFlow Lite Micro, developers can now build sophisticated voice agents on hardware costing just 80 cents.
It includes voice-activity detection, command recognition, and neural speech synthesis and can run in as little as 470 KB of RAM.
- clayhacks
I made a little python wrapper around it to serve an HTTP endpoint that’s OpenAI/elevenlabs compatible https://github.com/clayrosenthal/bootlegger
- sgt
Quick link to the video where he demos it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMliOFYBiz4
- nutanc
This is awesome. I am trying to build a full scale ASR system within 20-25MB. Now that we have Claude code to run experiments, I have started running some experiments. Promising results so far. First realization is that you can capture the nuances of speech in just 3300 embedding vectors(786d). This sequence can be decoded with a small CTC system to get text. Next experiments are on reducing the 768 dimension space into a 64D space. Thats also show some promising results. Hooking up my system so that the agent blogs the results everyday[1]. So my research "claw" setup does the experiments and posts results which I check in the morning and adjust the experiment direction as needed. Its not fully automated yet, but almost there.
[1] https://blog.trulm.com/posts/speech-as-independent-parts/
- almogo
Stt/tts systems always seem to me so promising, but I pretty much never use voice to interface with a computer. Sometimes instead of typing on my phone, I use a voice dictation. I would be keen to use voice to control Claude code, but I've always felt that the way I speak is different from the way I write good prompts.
Fishing for anecdotes here, does anyone have any good tts/stt experiences?
- jedberg
Do you have any accuracy benchmarks?
I’ve worked in this space. TTS in a small footprint isn’t the hard part —- it’s doing it accurately that’s hard.
Although for the use cases OP is targeting, lower accuracy may be good enough!