I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
Details
- External ID
- 46832074
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
- Website domain
- simedw.com
- Launched
- Jan. 31, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 469
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9920948616600791
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Built this because tones are killing my spoken Mandarin and I can't reliably hear my own mistakes.It's a 9M Conformer-CTC model trained on ~300h (AISHELL + Primewords), quantized to INT8 (11 MB), runs 100% in-browser via ONNX Runtime Web.Grades per-syllable pronunciation + tones with Viterbi forced alignment.Try it here: https://simedw.com/projects/ear/
Enrichment
- Theme
- audio and signal processing tools
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Model & infra
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- mandarin tone correction speech model
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Training custom acoustic speech models (Conformer-CTC) on 300+ hours of audio with Viterbi forced alignment and quantization requires specialized machine learning research.
What it would actually take: The stack involves PyTorch/NeMo for training a Conformer-CTC acoustic model on phonetic/tonal Mandarin corpora, implementing custom loss functions for tone deviation, exporting and quantizing to INT8 ONNX, and executing client-side forced alignment via ONNX Runtime Web and Web Audio APIs.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Accuracy issues with longer sentences and at normal speech pace, Difficulty distinguishing high/mid tone contrasts in tonal languages, Limited learning materials available for some languages like Cantonese, Accent becomes harder to fix after it's ingrained through practice
Feature requests: Add Thai language support, Improve accuracy for longer phrases and natural speech speed, Focus on smaller phrase accuracy before scaling to longer sentences
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 141 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 142 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 89 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Parrot Speech-to-text API · ph · 2026-05-26 · 194 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- slotvox · github · 2026-09-26 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB · hn · 2025-12-29 · 514 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a model & infra tool for Fintech yet.