The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that distributed speech recognition front-ends can be deployed in environments which provide for very little power and CPU resources, with possibly no degradation of speech recognition quality when compared to standard floating-point implementations. The ETSI distributed speech recognition front-end standard is implemented on an ultra low-power miniature DSP system. The efficient implementation of the ETSI algorithm components, i.e. feature extraction, feature compression and multi-framing, is accomplished through the use of three processing units running concurrently. In addition to a DSP core, an input/ output processor creates frames of input speech signals, and a weighted overlap-add (WOLA) filterbank unit performs windowing, FFT and vector multiplications. System evaluation using the TI digits database shows that the performance of the ultra low-power DSP system is equivalent to the reference implementation provided by ETSI.