I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
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/
I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones launched on January 31, 2026 with 469 votes, #23 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This tool helps Mandarin learners improve their tone pronunciation by analyzing recorded speech directly in the browser. It uses a 9-million-parameter speech model trained on hundreds of hours of Mandarin audio to evaluate each syllable's pronunciation and tones, providing per-syllable feedback. The model runs entirely locally using ONNX Runtime Web, requiring no server uploads. It addresses a common challenge for learners who struggle to self-assess their own tonal accuracy.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A tiny on-device speech model to grade Mandarin pronunciation and tones.
TL;DR: Mandarin pronunciation has been hard for me, so I took ~300 hours of transcribed speech and trained a small CTC model to grade my pronunciation. You can try it here . In my previous post about Langseed , I introduced a platform for defining words using only vocabulary I had already mastered. My vocabulary has grown since then, but unfortunately, people still struggle to understand what I'm saying. Part of the problem is tones. They're fairly foreign to me, and I'm bad at hearing my own mistakes, which is deeply frustrating when you don’t have a teacher. My initial plan was to build a pitch visualiser: split incoming audio into small chunks, run an FFT, extract the dominant pitch over…from simedw.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- MTMandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation2019 · mandarintonetrainer.com · ▲237
Parrot Speech-to-text APIMay 2026 · ringg.ai · ▲194Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents
17MB model beats human experts at pronunciation scoringFeb 2026 · huggingface.co · ▲13This app lets you record or upload an audio clip and type the expected text to receive a detailed pronunciation score, word‑by‑word feedback, and phoneme analysis. It can also turn spoken audio int...
- MWMandarin Word Segmenter with Translation2025 · mandobot.netlify.app · ▲48
I've built mandoBot, a web app that segments and translates Mandarin Chinese text. This is a Django API (using Django-Ninja and PostgreSQL) and a NextJS front-end (with Typescript and Chakra). For a sample of what this app does, head to https://mandobot.netlify.app/?share_id=e8PZ8KFE5Y. This is my presentation of the first chapter of a classic story from the Republican era of Chinese fiction, Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun. Other chapters are located in the "Reading Room" section of the app. This app exists because reading Mandarin is very hard for learners (like me), since…
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