Cactus Compute · Tiny On-Device ASR

Whistle

Cactus's speech recognition model for small devices, released 2 October as the companion to Needle 3 (covered here in week 39). It is a 16.9MB model for 16kHz mono audio up to 30 seconds per pass, transcribing English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish, and it returns transcripts, word-level timestamps with probabilities and speech embeddings. Cactus reports first token in 11ms and 1,319 tokens a second on an Apple M4 Pro CPU, and says it beats Whisper Base and Moonshine Tiny v2 on word error rate across LibriSpeech, SPGISpeech and Earnings-22, without giving the figures. It shares Needle's C++ engine, so speech and language can ship in one binary. Apache-2.0 weights on Hugging Face.