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pronunciation feedback

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I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

simedw.com

#mandarin tones#pronunciation#speech recognition#language learning

469points
153comments
#60of 4,366 in 2026
Top 2%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

18 positive, 21 neutral or asking, 7 mixed, 13 critical, out of 59 comments about the project. Thread score +0.13.

Idea: 12 for, 1 againstPerformance: 2 for, 10 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Intuitive UI and quick demo

    From 2 comments
    • talk about 30 seconds to wow. great app, UX and demo. would love to use this. kudos.
      nirvanatikku on HN
    • This is incredible. When I was first learning Chinese (casually, ~20 years ago), my teacher used some Windows software that drew a diagram of the shape of my pronunciation, so…
      rahimnathwani on HN
  • Useful for learners without native speakers nearby

    From 2 comments
    • instantly awesome. I suck at chinese but I want to get better and I'm too embarassed to try and talk with real people and practise. This is a great compromise. even just…
      drekipus on HN
    • This is fantastic. Been looking for a way to get feedback on my pronunciation since I came back from Shanghai and haven't been seeing native speakers every day. Is there any plan…
      ctkhn on HN

Objections

  • Misrecognizes tones in fast or conversational speech

    From 2 comments
    • Longtime lurker, made an account specifically to give feedback here as an intermediate speaker. :) This is a great initiative and I hope to see more come out of this; I am not…
      dapangzi on HN
    • Well, it would work only when I speak word by word, not as a sentence or in a normal speed for daily conversations. The model thinks I was making mistakes when I speak casually…
      tifan on HN
  • Sensitive to background noise and mic quality

    From 3 comments
    • As a native speaker of Mandarin the demo it's not work for me. It can't check the pronounce of my voice. I don't know what's wrong of it, may be it's too sensitive(my daughter…
      alixwang on HN
    • It might be a mic issue but my wife, who is a native speaker, seems to get most characters wrong. I will try again later in a quieter place to see if that helps.
      olalonde on HN
    • Chinese here, some of the tune is wrong, maybe the env here has some noise, good luck on learning mandarin ;)
      wenjian on HN
  • Flags correct native pronunciation as wrong

    From 2 comments
    • This is extremely cool, although I asked my wife (who is Chinese) to try it out and it said she made some mistakes.
      affogarty on HN
    • This is a very cool to have! Thanks for putting the time to build it. For me it doesn't work very well. Even easy phrases like 他很忙 get transcribed completely random "ma he yu".…
      redleader55 on HN

Requests

  • Support for other languages

    From 3 comments
    • I wish this were available for more languages! It would also be neat to estimate the native language of the speaker, given their pronunciation of the target language, and propose…
      alexandermorgan on HN
    • Nice! I need something similar for english now
      martianlantern on HN
    • This is amazing, if you feel like opening an entire language to being learned more easily.. Farsi is a VERY overlooked language, my wife/her family speak it but it's so difficult…
      jellojello on HN
  • Release inference and training code

    From 2 comments
  • Desktop or mobile version

    From 1 comment
    • This is fantastic. Been looking for a way to get feedback on my pronunciation since I came back from Shanghai and haven't been seeing native speakers every day. Is there any plan…
      ctkhn on HN

Questions

  • How the model was trained and on what data

    From 2 comments
    • Super interesting project. Curious about the data collection - did you record yourself, use existing datasets, or both? I've been thinking about building something similar for…
      kris_builds on HN
    • Cool. Would love a write up about how you did it if you have time
      victorbjorklund on HN
  • Whether Cantonese is supported

    From 1 comment
    • How difficult would it be to adapt this to Cantonese? It is a surprisingly difficult language to learn. It has more tones than Mandarin plus comparatively less access to learning…
      stuxnet79 on HN

Alternatives named

  • Azure Speech Studio

    From 1 comment
    • Have you tried the Azure Speech Studio? I wonder how your custom model compares to this solution. I played around with python scripts for the same purpose. The AI gives feedback…
      cocoa19 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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