SenseVoice
Multilingual model covering speech recognition, emotion recognition, and audio event detection.
About
SenseVoice is the speech understanding member of Alibaba's FunAudioLLM family, sharing a lineage with the CosyVoice synthesis models. The released SenseVoice-Small checkpoint handles automatic speech recognition, spoken language identification, speech emotion recognition, and audio event detection in one non-autoregressive model covering Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Japanese, and Korean, drawn from a training program of more than 400,000 hours of audio. Because decoding is non-autoregressive, the authors report inference more than 5 times faster than Whisper-Small and 15 times faster than Whisper-Large at comparable parameter counts, with an accuracy edge on Chinese and Cantonese test sets such as AISHELL-1, AISHELL-2, and WenetSpeech. It runs on CPU or GPU through pip install funasr, and exports to ONNX, LibTorch, and GGUF for llama.cpp-style deployment. The repository code is MIT licensed while the weights use the FunASR model license, which permits commercial use with attribution; the project has around 9,000 GitHub stars and is widely used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean transcription.
Should you use SenseVoice?
Pick it when
Pick SenseVoice when you transcribe Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, or Korean on CPU or modest GPUs and also want language ID, emotion, and audio event tags from one fast non-autoregressive model.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if your audio is outside its five languages, where Whisper or Qwen3-ASR cover far more, or if you want standard open weights licensing, since the weights use the custom FunASR model license while Qwen3-ASR is Apache 2.0.
Alternatives to SenseVoice
- Qwen3-ASR
Covers 30 languages and 22 Chinese dialects with streaming and timestamps under Apache 2.0, but GPUs with FlashAttention 2 are recommended where SenseVoice runs on CPU.
- Whisper
About 99 languages and translation into English, but slower: SenseVoice reports 15 times faster inference than Whisper-Large.
- Paraformer (FunASR)
Same FunASR toolkit, focused on fast Chinese and English recognition with timestamps, VAD, and punctuation instead of emotion tags.
- FireRedASR
Larger models aimed at top Mandarin accuracy, dialects, and sung lyrics, needing a GPU where SenseVoice runs on CPU.
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Details
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- MIT
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026