Skip to main content

My experience as a new working student at Axelera#1

  • January 20, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 50 views

Abdi
Cadet

Hello everyone,

Abdi here. I am a part-time working student at Axelera. I joined in December.

I am having a blast playing with the Metis devices. Our task is focused on testing the Voyager SDK documentation. Is it clear enough for the customer? Where can it be improved? We test the documentation by actually following it, such as working through the tutorials provided in the documentation.

Furthermore, we test how easy it is to perform tasks that users may actually want to do, such as counting how many objects are in a video frame using YOLO. Deploying models,running different kinds of models.

We evaluate how useful the documentation is in this context and identify where the gaps are.

Currently, I am working on integrating an external tool, Whisper, with the Metis Dev System on the Arduino Portenta X8, and  routing Whisper’s output into an LLM running on the device.
 

-Abdi

 

 

 

4 replies

Spanner
Axelera Team
Forum|alt.badge.img+3
  • Axelera Team
  • January 21, 2026

Nice work ​@Abdi ! Whisper is huge - that’s where the natural language interaction begins, and that’s where AI really integrates with humanity! Being able to just chat with each other. Mind blowing stuff that we’re already starting to take for granted.

Would love to see your progress or experimentation with it - feel free to share it!

Also, you get bonus points for your profile image! 🖖 (Did you watch Starfleet Academy yet? I’m keeping my powder dry for now, but so far I’m a little underwhelmed… especially after how awesome SNW turned out to be!)


Abdi
Cadet
  • Author
  • Cadet
  • January 30, 2026

Thanks for the kinds words ​@Spanner 

Fellow work student ​@Pablo Herrero made a neat bash script that get this task done

#!/bin/bash

WHISPER_DIR=~/whisper.cpp
VOYAGER_DIR=~/voyager-sdk
AUDIO_FILE=$1

# Store transcription
echo "Whisper Transcription:"
TRANSCRIPT=$($WHISPER_DIR/build/bin/whisper-cli -m $WHISPER_DIR/models/ggml-base.en.bin -f "$AUDIO_FILE" -nt -np)

echo "$TRANSCRIPT"
echo ""

# Feed to Llama inside its environment
echo "Llama Response:"
cd $VOYAGER_DIR
source venv/bin/activate
axllm llama-3-2-1b-1024-4core-static --prompt "$TRANSCRIPT" | sed -n '/Assistant:/,$p'

This script assumes: You have whisper installed and you are running voyager-SDK 1.5

 

#trek stuff
I haven’t watched star fleet academy yet ,I’ll keep my expectations to a minimum. 
I did hear good words from SNW ,I may give it a shot!
 

 


Spanner
Axelera Team
Forum|alt.badge.img+3
  • Axelera Team
  • January 30, 2026

Nice! So this let’s Voyager run Whisper locally?


Abdi
Cadet
  • Author
  • Cadet
  • January 30, 2026

Yeah.  Two stages process: the script sends the audio files to whisper
whisper turns into text , the script passes the text to voyager-SDK which runs the LLM.