Techniques are provided for wake-on-voice (WOV) key-phrase enrollment. A methodology implementing the techniques according to an embodiment includes generating a WOV key-phrase model based on identification of the sequence of sub-phonetic units of a user-provided key-phrase. The WOV key-phrase model is employed by a WOV processor for detection of the user spoken key-phrase and triggering operation of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) processor in response to the detection. The method further includes updating an ASR language model based on the user-provided key-phrase. The update includes one of embedding the WOV key-phrase model into the ASR language model, converting sub-phonetic units of the WOV key-phrase model and embedding the converted WOV key-phrase model into the ASR language model, or generating an ASR key-phrase model by applying a phoneme-syllable based statistical language model to the user-provided key-phrase and embedding the generated ASR key-phrase model into the ASR language model.