8-year-old builds fully offline voice-controlled AI storyteller on an $8 ESP32
JarnoDuursma · x · 2026-10-22
An 8-year-old named Laksh turned an $8 ESP32-S3 microcontroller into a fully offline, voice-controlled AI storyteller — no Wi-Fi, no cloud, no API.
- Hardware: ESP32-S3, INMP441 mic, I2S speaker and Max 98357A amplifier.
- He forked slvDev's open-source TinyStories LLM for ESP32 (a 28.9M-param model running on-chip at 9.88 tokens/s, mostly in flash using Gemma 3n's Per-Layer Embeddings idea), and added voice, animation, and voice commands like play/pause/resume/next.
- Current drawback: poor English TTS on ESP32; the community is working on it. The base repo has 4.6k stars.
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