An image search system uses a multi-modal model to determine relevance of images to a spoken query. The multi-modal model includes a spoken language model that extracts features from spoken query and a language processing model that extract features from an image. The multi-model model determines a relevance score for the image and the spoken query based on the extracted features. The multi-modal model is trained using a curriculum approach that includes training the spoken language model using audio data. Subsequently, a training dataset comprising a plurality of spoken queries and one or more images associated with each spoken query is used to jointly train the spoken language model and an image processing model to provide a trained multi-modal model.