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Ambient AI assistant

What does the adaptive voice gate cost on a Cortex-M4, in flash and instructions per frame, and is the block-minimum floor worth it?

research/ambient-gatem4

What does the adaptive voice gate cost on a Cortex-M4? ambient-gatefw's C gate built with clang for Thumb-2 and run in an emulator: bit-exact, about 250 bytes of code, 3237 instructions per frame exact and 2096 with the block-10 floor, because the energy sum dominates. Instructions, not cycles; stylised.

3 tests

What it found

A stylised follow-up to ambient-gatefw. Its C gate is built with clang for Cortex-M4 (Thumb-2, soft float) and run frame by frame in an emulator on ambient-gateroc’s synthetic audio. It is bit-exact with the Python reference, takes 236–258 bytes of code at -Os, and its only library call is the 64-bit divide, once per frame. The exact gate executes 3237 instructions per 20 ms frame at -Os; the block-10 floor executes 2096, a 35% cut, because the 320-sample energy sum (about 1980 instructions) is the floor under the saving. Instructions are not cycles, the divide is not counted, and nothing ran on hardware. Stylised.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/ambient-gatem4: block_instructions
ambient-gatem4/experiments/block_instructions.png, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.