Hi everyone, happy 2026! This short article is just to share a new side project I started working on during the New Year’s break. Over the past year, we have started to see a vast number of companies developing hardware for AI assistants. There were also a lot of acquisitions related to these devices (e.g., Amazon bought Bee [1]), and there were also a lot of fiascos, of course (e.g., Rabbit devices, Humane, and so on). I think that these devices have a strong future ahead due to their potential, so I started prototyping some code for recording, compression, and transmission, and testing some microphones. I found excellent transcription results even with a single microphone, so I decided to start a small side project during the New Year’s break which ended up becoming the the Auris I on the right.

Routing took quite a bit of work, as the main SoC used not only castellated pins but also pins under the board which were very difficult to route. Another issue was the requirements of the RF module, which required some clearance on the ground plane, however, this was still much easier than going straight with the RF SoC without the guest board. The main challenges now are chip shortages for some components, but I expect to have a prototype working by the end of February. I will do another post then with more details and some interesting results. The board ended up being only 5 cm. There is, of course, a lot that can be reduced, but that will come in the Auris II after I manage to hack it a bit.