Tali STT
Tali STT is the on-device speech-to-text engine for TaliOS, compiled for mobile NPU (Neural Processing Unit) acceleration.
What it does
Tali STT is the first model in the TaliOS voice pipeline. It listens to microphone audio and converts spoken words into text — continuously, at low latency, on the user's device. Audio never leaves the hardware: there is no cloud transcription path in the production runtime.
User speech ──► Tali STT ──► text ──► Tali NLU / Storm / Nautilus
(audio) (this) (UTF-8) (downstream language models)
The text Tali STT produces is the input to every downstream TaliOS language model. Quality and latency of the rest of the voice pipeline are gated by this model.
Why NPU
Mobile NPUs (the Hexagon DSP/AI co-processor on Snapdragon, equivalents on other SoCs) run audio inference at a fraction of the power cost of the main CPU. Tali STT models in this repository are pre-compiled per chipset family so the runtime can load them directly — no on-device compilation step at install time.
Variants
| Tali ID | Size | Target Chipsets | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| TALI-STT-TINY | ~50 MB | QCS8550, SD8G3, SD8E | P0 |
| TALI-STT-BASE | ~150 MB | QCS8550, SD8G3, SD8E | P0 |
| TALI-STT-SMALL | ~500 MB | QCS8550, SD8G3, SD8E | P1 |
The TaliOS runtime selects the largest variant the device can support, falling back to a smaller one if NPU memory is constrained.
Target Chipsets
| Chipset | Device class |
|---|---|
| QCS8550 | Smart-glass class (Vuzix LX1 / QCS4490 compatible) |
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 | Flagship phones 2024-2025 |
| Snapdragon 8 Elite | Flagship phones 2025-2026 |
File format
Shipped weights are wrapped in AON — Tali's encrypted, signed asset container. The .aon extension is the only format the OS or external tooling sees. AON files are decrypted in-process by the TaliOS runtime; they cannot be loaded by third-party inference engines.
License
Proprietary — Intelligent Devices LLC.