sensevoice-ko-jerry

SenseVoiceSmall fine-tuned for Korean (wake word "제리" / Jerry)

A fine-tune of SenseVoiceSmall, exported to ONNX so it runs on a Raspberry Pi 4B voice assistant. Both the fp32 export and an int8 quantized version are here.

Why this exists

The base model already handles everyday Korean just fine. The problem was one word: the wake word "제리". In a 30-utterance baseline, 11 of the 13 errors were that single word — it kept coming out as "제야" (7 times), "재이", "젤리", "젤이", "데야". Meanwhile it happily nailed things like "삼성전자", "비트코인 시세", and "무슨 요일이야".

So this isn't a "make Korean ASR better" model. It's a "make one stubborn wake word work on my hardware, in my voice" model.

<!-- Fill in post-fine-tune numbers from the 75-sentence holdout. -->

Training data (round 2)

Recordings are 16 kHz mono, captured through the ReSpeaker Lite USB mic attached to the Pi. That part matters more than it sounds — training on audio that came through a different mic than the one you'll actually use throws away most of the benefit. Each sentence was read twice with deliberately different pace, tone, and mic distance; the two takes differ by about 25% in length at the median, so the second pass is real data rather than a copy.

20 epochs, val loss 7.19 → 1.29 (flat after epoch 16). The last 5 checkpoints were averaged.

How the sentences were chosen. Picking sentences by hand always ends up phonetically lopsided, so instead the script greedily selects sentences that maximize phoneme coverage — set cover over three units: onset+nucleus, nucleus+coda, and coda→next-onset (where most Korean phonological alternation happens). The pool of general Korean sentences comes from the Zeroth-Korean transcripts (CC BY 4.0). Wake-word phrases, real commands, and near-homophone negatives ("체리", "저리", "처리", "자리", "소리"…) were written by hand, since no corpus contains those.

The 75-sentence holdout shares zero sentences with the training set. The previous round had no holdout at all, which made its numbers meaningless.

Things you should know before using this

• It's speaker-specific. One person's voice, one microphone. On other speakers it may well be worse than the base model. If you want general-purpose Korean ASR, use the original SenseVoiceSmall.
• It's tuned for the wake word "제리". Different wake word, no reason to reach for this.
• Public corpus audio is mixed in this time (3 h of Zeroth), which should limit catastrophic forgetting — but only one speaker's data got the noise augmentation and the 2× repetition, so expect some drift on general Korean.

Usage

from funasr_onnx import SenseVoiceSmall

model = SenseVoiceSmall("path/to/sensevoice_ko_ft", batch_size=1, quantize=True)
print(model(["input.wav"], language="ko", use_itn=True))
# ['<|ko|><|NEUTRAL|><|Speech|><|woitn|>제리']

The loader reads a folder, not a single file. Alongside the ONNX you need config.yaml, am.mvn, and chn_jpn_yue_eng_ko_spectok.bpe.model — the last one isn't a training artifact, it ships with the original SenseVoiceSmall.

Only MatMul ops are quantized. Quantizing everything makes the file marginally smaller but tends to run slower on ARM Cortex-A72, where the extra quantize/dequantize traffic isn't worth it. If you're on x86, measure for yourself — the tradeoff is different there.

License and credit

Derived from iic/SenseVoiceSmall and covered by the FunASR Model Open Source License Agreement (full text). The SenseVoice code is MIT; the weights are not — worth reading before you redistribute anything built on this.

Sentence text from Zeroth-Korean (CC BY 4.0). The audio in this training set was recorded by me; Zeroth's own audio was used as-is for the 3 h mix-in.

Training and export scripts: https://github.com/Plzsay23/voicebot (training/)