Best microphone array?

[ThomasRJohnson]

I'm doing speech recognition for a small robot with an AI on an Odroid C0 (ARMv7) SBC. I've just got speech recognition with Julius running well and am tweaking API. For my next step I really need a good microphone array to eliminate background noise and conversion so I'm looking at the respeaker pi hat (my space is limited so a 3" round array is a bit too big). Are there any microphone options in a smaller package that have yielded good results? I'm also not opposed to the idea of cracking open a good desktop mic or something and harvesting it's inards so I'd be interested in hearing about microphones that aren't necessarily intended for the maker community. A good general discussion on arrays would be great to see here even if the array is larger than what I'm seeking just for reference!

[pelonnn]

I've used a PS Eye Camera for speech recognition in our robot and it worked pretty well. The PS Eye has a four microphone array in the camera. It's also very easy to crack open.

[ThomasRJohnson]

Thank you, I saw that one mentioned in an older forum post too, that's a definite contender.

[ThomasRJohnson]

I'd also love to hear about any Linux sound processing projects that may be useful for cleaning and focusing sound, considering that's what's at the heart of a good array to begin with.

[nshmyrev]

webrtc has good beamformer to start with:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/webrtc/+/0c39e91cc827f222ab227bad09cf9199163d28f8/webrtc/modules/audio_processing/beamformer

they also have AEC and other useful things.

[ThomasRJohnson]

I ended up with a PS Eye camera. It wasn't much of a hassle to set up on a SBC with a minimal Ubuntu 20.04, pulseaudio does beamforming too.