Launching spchcat, an open-source speech recognition tool for Linux and Raspberry Pi

During the pandemic travel lockdown I’ve ended up accumulating a lot of vacation time, so I decided to take a lot of December off. I did spend some time relaxing, especially walking our adorable new dogs, but there were some coding itches I wanted to scratch. One of the biggest was building a simple system for prototyping voice interfaces on an embedded...

3w

How to get started with Coqui’s open source on-device speech to text tool

Image from Wikimedia I think the transformative power of on-device speech to text is criminally under-rated (and I’m not alone), so I’m a massive fan of the work Coqui are doing to make the technology more widely accessible. Coqui is a startup working on a complete open source solution to speech recognition, as well as text to speech, and I’ve...

4w

Why are ML Compilers so Hard?

Image from Wikimedia Even before the first version of TensorFlow was released, the XLA project was integrated as a “domain-specific compiler” for its machine learning graphs. Since then there have been a lot of other compilers aimed at ML problems, like TVM, MLIR, EON, and GLOW. They have all been very successful in different areas, but they’re...

5w

The Death of Feature Engineering is Greatly Exaggerated

Image by OfSmallThings One of the most exciting aspects of deep learning’s emergence in computer vision a few years ago was that it didn’t appear to require any feature engineering, unlike previous techniques like histograms-of-gradients or Haar cascades. As neural networks ate up other fields like NLP and speech, the hope was that feature engineering...

Dec 2021

One weird trick to shrink convolutional networks for TinyML

A colleague recently asked for more details on an approach I recommended, but which she hadn’t seen any documentation for. I realized that it was something I’d learned from talking to model builders at Google, and I wasn’t sure there was anything written up, so in the spirit of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone coming after, I thought I should...

Aug 2021

How to write to flash on an Arduino Nano BLE

Photo by Brecht Bug I’ve been enjoying using the Arduino Nano Sense BLE 33 board as an all-round microcontroller for my machine learning work, but I had trouble figuring out how to programmatically write to flash memory from a sketch. I need to do this because I want to be able to download ML models over Bluetooth and then have them persist even...

Apr 2021

How to transfer files over BLE

Image from Wikipedia I’ve now taught a lot of workshops on TinyML using the Arduino Nano Sense BLE 33 board, including the new EdX course, and while it’s a fantastic piece of technology I often have to spend a lot of time helping students figure out how to get the boards communicating with their computer. Flashing programs to the Arduino relies...

Apr 2021

How screen scraping and TinyML can turn any dial into an API

https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device This image shows a traditional water meter that’s been converted into a web API, using a cheap ESP32 camera and machine learning to understand the dials and numbers. I expect there are going to be billions of devices like this deployed over the next decade, not only for water meters but for any...

Mar 2021

Why Do I Think There Will be Hundreds of Billions of TinyML Devices Within a Few Years?

Image by The Noun Project A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have the chance to present at the Linley Processor Conference. I gave a talk on “What TinyML Needs from Hardware“, and afterwards one of the attendees emailed to ask where some of my numbers came from. In particular, he was intrigued by my note on slide 6 that “Expectations are for...

Nov 2020

How to Organize a Zoom Wedding

Photo by Chantal Joanne and I got engaged two years ago in Paris, and were planning on getting married in the summer, before the pandemic intervened. Once it became clear that it might be years until everybody could meet up in person, especially older members of our families who were overseas, we started looking into how we could have our ceremony...

Aug 2020