South Asia · Kannada
Kannada Conversational Speech Dataset
Kannada conversational speech sourced to your specification — no inventory, no fixed listing. This page covers what is specifically hard about this pairing, and which fields your specification needs to pin down.
Why conversational speech in Kannada is its own problem
Kannada conversation is transcribed into a script that writes every vowel explicitly, which turns spelling into a decision: when a speaker reduces or drops a word-final vowel — the normal habit in fast colloquial Kannada — the transcriber must write the full vowel, cut it with the virama, or write an informal contraction, and no standard settles which. Two annotators who heard the same clip return different text, so an agreement score between their transcripts understates how much they agreed. The convention has to be fixed in a spelling table before annotation, not argued case by case.
The field to pin down first: Provide a canonical colloquial spelling table covering reduced final vowels and contracted verb endings, and treat it as part of the guideline — without it, inter-annotator agreement on Kannada conversation cannot be measured.
At a glance
| Language | Kannada |
|---|---|
| Primary region | South Asia |
| Writing system | Kannada |
| Category | Conversational Speech |
| Specification field to settle first | Provide a canonical colloquial spelling table covering reduced final vowels and contracted verb endings, and treat it as part of the guideline — without it, inter-annotator agreement on Kannada conversation cannot be measured. |
| Delivery | Sourced to order, pilot batch before the full run |
What conversational speech data is
Speech from natural conversation between two or more people, on open or semi-structured topics, used for conversational AI, voice assistants, and small talk models.
What buyers get wrong about it
Natural conversation is full of overlapping speech, interruptions, particles, and laughter. Whether to keep these "messy" parts is the first thing to lock down on a project like this.
The specification field that decides the quote
Whether overlapping speech is kept or split — the two outputs cannot be mixed in a single delivery batch.
The language side: what Kannada demands
Kannada has more than a dozen regional dialects, but only a few have a written tradition. That rules out transcribing dialect speech against a standard script, so the specific dialects to be collected have to be fixed first.
What we can put in this delivery
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Read and conversational speech
Scripted recording for TTS, and unscripted conversation for recognition. Specified separately because they need different speaker pools.
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Transcription to your convention
Orthographic or phonetic, with the guideline written before production and shared with you for review.
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Speaker metadata
Age band, gender, region and dialect background per file, so you can slice the dataset rather than take it whole.
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Consent documentation
Signed speaker consent covering the intended use, plus collection methodology and the annotation guideline.
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Pilot batch
A small batch first, which you can reject. Misalignments surface after a few hours rather than at delivery.
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Delivery in your format
Audio format, sampling rate, segmentation length and metadata schema set to your pipeline's requirements.
What arrives in a delivery
| Component | What it is |
|---|---|
| Audio files | Format, sampling rate and segmentation length set to your pipeline. Named to a convention you specify. |
| Transcription | Orthographic or phonetic, produced under a guideline you review before production starts. |
| Speaker metadata | Age band, gender, region and dialect background per file, plus a speaker identifier so the dataset can be sliced. |
| Recording conditions | Environment, device and, where relevant, measured signal-to-noise ratio per file. |
| Annotation guideline | The document the annotators worked from, so you can reproduce the conventions on your own data. |
| Consent records | Signed speaker consent covering your intended use, with the transfer mechanism addressed where required. |
| Collection methodology | How speakers were recruited, screened and scheduled — the part that tells you how biased the pool is. |
| Quality report | Pilot outcome, re-work log, and the annotator agreement figures where the task supports measuring them. |
Questions we get about Kannada Conversational Speech
How many distinct speakers can you provide for Kannada Conversational Speech?
It depends on the specification and the timeline, and we will give a real number rather than a target. For this pairing, speaker recruitment is usually the step that sets the schedule. Provide a canonical colloquial spelling table covering reduced final vowels and contracted verb endings, and treat it as part of the guideline — without it, inter-annotator agreement on Kannada conversation cannot be measured.
Can you annotate to our own guideline instead of the default?
Yes, and for this pairing we would recommend it. Kannada conversation is transcribed into a script that writes every vowel explicitly, which turns spelling into a decision: when a speaker reduces or drops a word-final vowel — the normal habit in fast colloquial Kannada — the transcriber must write the full vowel, cut it with the virama, or write an informal contraction, and no standard settles which. That is exactly the kind of decision a default guideline leaves open, and it is where annotators diverge. Send us your guideline, or we will draft one and you can review it before production starts.
Do you offer a sample before we commit to a full run?
Yes. Select a free sample in the request form and describe what you need. A pilot batch is the cheapest way to establish whether the quality bar is reachable for Kannada Conversational Speech before committing to the full volume.
Is the data licensed or owned outright?
Licensing terms are set per project, so tell us how the model will be used and whether it will be distributed. Consent documentation travels with the data either way, and we do not handle medical or clinical data or recorded telephone calls.
Other datasets in Kannada
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Kannada Singing Voice
Vocal recordings with melody, in both a cappella and accompanied form, used for singing voice synthesis, music information retrieval, and lyric alignment.
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Kannada Speech Commands
Targeted recordings of short command words or phrases, usually with many speakers reading each entry several times over, used for wake words and on-device command recognition.
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Kannada Read Speech
Recordings of speakers reading specified text, with clear pronunciation and known text, the base material for TTS and ASR.
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Kannada Podcast Speech
Long-form podcast and interview audio, either solo monologue or two-person conversation, used for long-form speech recognition and speaker modeling.
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Kannada Multilingual Speech
Speech data covering multiple languages within one project, used for multilingual ASR, cross-lingual transfer, and language identification.
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Kannada Noisy Speech
Speech collected under background noise — street, in-car, restaurant, office and other real environments — used for noise-robust models and speech enhancement.
Conversational Speech in other languages
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Persian Conversational Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Tamil Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Telugu Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Malayalam Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Nepali Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Sinhala Conversational Speech
South Asia
Request Kannada Conversational Speech
Tell us the language, the hours, and what the data needs to look like. You will get a real number and a real timeline — not a range. If we cannot source it well, we will tell you that instead.
- Pilot batch before the full run, so problems surface early.
- Consent documentation delivered with the data.
- No medical or clinical data. No recorded telephone calls.