# Ticket: Select ASR Engine and Target Hardware

## Ticket Information

- **ID**: TICKET-009
- **Title**: Select ASR Engine and Target Hardware
- **Type**: Research
- **Priority**: High
- **Status**: Done
- **Track**: Voice I/O
- **Milestone**: Milestone 1 - Survey & Architecture
- **Created**: 2024-01-XX

## Description

Decide on ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) engine and deployment:
- Evaluate options: faster-whisper, Whisper.cpp, etc.
- Decide deployment: faster-whisper on 4080, CPU-only on small box, or shared
- Consider model size vs latency trade-offs
- Document hardware requirements

## Acceptance Criteria

- [x] ASR engine selected: **faster-whisper** (primary)
- [x] Target hardware decided: **RTX 4080 (primary)** or **CPU always-on node (alternative)**
- [x] Model size selected: **small** (or medium if GPU headroom available)
- [x] Latency requirements documented (< 2s target)
- [x] Decision recorded in architecture docs

## Technical Details

Considerations:
- faster-whisper on 4080: Lower latency, higher quality
- CPU-only on small box: Lower cost, higher latency
- Shared deployment: Resource contention considerations
- Model sizes: tiny/small/medium/base for latency/quality trade-off

## Dependencies

- TICKET-004 (architecture) - helpful context

## Related Files

- `docs/ASR_EVALUATION.md` (to be created)
- `ARCHITECTURE.md`

## Notes

Can run in parallel with TTS and LLM work. Needs wake-word event flow defined for when to start/stop capture.

## Progress Log

- 2024-01-XX - ASR evaluation document created (`docs/ASR_EVALUATION.md`)
- 2024-01-XX - Selected: faster-whisper with small model
- 2024-01-XX - Deployment: RTX 4080 (primary) or CPU always-on node (alternative)
- 2024-01-XX - Ready for implementation (TICKET-010)