Developer Trains 9M-Parameter Mandarin Pronunciation Tutor Using CTC Loss

An independent developer created a highly specialized, on-device Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) system for Mandarin tones, circumventing commercial APIs. The system, built using a Conformer encoder and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss, was trained on 300 hours of speech data. This approach prioritizes verbatim transcription over auto-correction, offering granular feedback crucial for mastering tonal languages.