Comment by pseudosavant

I was just looking what it would take to have a local LLM assistant and ended up on ReSpeaker too.

I am just wrapping up another Pi Zero W audio recording project (https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-audio-recorder). I used the first-gen Zero W since I had one already lying around. I'd strongly recommend using the newer Pi Zero 2 W though.

The Zero W CPU is just so slow. It can barely (e.g. 1.05x) do real-time MP3 encoding, and the single core makes it prone to being interrupted by background tasks. It couldn't even do SMB/Windows file sharing faster than 0.5MB/sec without disabling encryption in Samba. Encryption kills this CPU.

I have a couple of Zero 2s coming in the mail.