Middle East & North Africa · Arabic / Latin
Kurdish Conversational Speech Dataset
Kurdish 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 Kurdish is its own problem
Natural Kurdish conversation is rarely monolingual: a speaker moves between Kurdish and the state language of their country — Turkish, Arabic, or Persian — inside a single topic, and that switching is how ordinary talk actually sounds. Underneath sits the branch split: a Kurmanji conversation from Turkey and a Sorani conversation from Iraq are not two accents of one language but two systems that do not cross-communicate, with different grammar (Kurmanji marks gender and case, Sorani does not). A batch labeled simply Kurdish cannot be annotated or trained on as one set.
The field to pin down first: The branch is stated per recording, and every conversation carries the speaker's country and the state language mixed into it; Kurmanji and Sorani material is delivered as separate batches and never pooled.
At a glance
| Language | Kurdish |
|---|---|
| Primary region | Middle East & North Africa |
| Writing system | Arabic / Latin |
| Category | Conversational Speech |
| Specification field to settle first | The branch is stated per recording, and every conversation carries the speaker's country and the state language mixed into it; Kurmanji and Sorani material is delivered as separate batches and never pooled. |
| 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 Kurdish demands
The two main branches of Kurdish (Sorani and Kurmanji) have low mutual intelligibility, close to two separate languages, and they use different scripts. Public resources are so thin that even TTS datasets are rare — a textbook scarce language.
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 Kurdish Conversational Speech
How many distinct speakers can you provide for Kurdish 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. The branch is stated per recording, and every conversation carries the speaker's country and the state language mixed into it; Kurmanji and Sorani material is delivered as separate batches and never pooled.
Can you annotate to our own guideline instead of the default?
Yes, and for this pairing we would recommend it. Natural Kurdish conversation is rarely monolingual: a speaker moves between Kurdish and the state language of their country — Turkish, Arabic, or Persian — inside a single topic, and that switching is how ordinary talk actually sounds. 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 Kurdish 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 Kurdish
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Kurdish Code-Switching Speech
Speech that mixes two or more languages inside a single utterance — Hinglish, Spanglish, Taglish — used for recognition in real spoken settings.
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Kurdish Children Speech
Speech data from child speakers, grouped by age band, used for children's speech recognition and children's education products.
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Kurdish Audiobook
Continuous long-form narration in audiobook style, steady in intonation and generous in duration, the main source material for high-quality TTS.
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Kurdish Short Video Speech
Speech in the talking-head style of short video — fast, emotionally strong, colloquial — used for short video subtitles and content understanding.
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Kurdish Live Stream Speech
Long-session spoken content from live streams — host monologue and responses to audience interaction — fast-paced and heavily improvised.
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Kurdish Voice Assistant
Command and dialogue data for voice assistants, usually with intent annotation, covering the full chain from wake word to understanding to response.
Conversational Speech in other languages
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Arabic (Egyptian) Conversational Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Arabic (Gulf) Conversational Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Kannada Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Punjabi Conversational Speech
South Asia
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Burmese Conversational Speech
Southeast Asia
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Amharic Conversational Speech
Sub-Saharan Africa
Request Kurdish 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.