South Asia · Sinhala
Sinhala Read Speech Dataset
Sinhala read 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 read speech in Sinhala is its own problem
The key question for Sinhala read speech is which text gets read. If the passage contains many English loanwords (common in written Sinhala), a speaker may read them with the English pronunciation or with a Sinhala-ized one, and that leaves the batch internally inconsistent.
The field to pin down first: The reading convention for loanwords has to be explicit, and loanwords should be marked in the text itself.
At a glance
| Language | Sinhala |
|---|---|
| Primary region | South Asia |
| Writing system | Sinhala |
| Category | Read Speech |
| Specification field to settle first | The reading convention for loanwords has to be explicit, and loanwords should be marked in the text itself. |
| Delivery | Sourced to order, pilot batch before the full run |
What read speech data is
Recordings of speakers reading specified text, with clear pronunciation and known text, the base material for TTS and ASR.
What buyers get wrong about it
The trap with read speech is that it is too clean — it comes out sounding like a news anchor, and a model trained on it underperforms in real conditions. We collect an extra set at natural speaking rate as a comparison.
The specification field that decides the quote
Studio (low noise floor) or home (real environment) — the two differ in both signal-to-noise ratio and price.
The language side: what Sinhala demands
Everyday Sinhala conversation is heavily embedded with English words, especially in the Colombo urban belt. Treating this mixed speech as pure Sinhala strips out high-frequency loanwords as if they were errors.
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 Sinhala Read Speech
How many distinct speakers can you provide for Sinhala Read 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 reading convention for loanwords has to be explicit, and loanwords should be marked in the text itself.
Can you annotate to our own guideline instead of the default?
Yes, and for this pairing we would recommend it. The key question for Sinhala read speech is which text gets read. 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 Sinhala Read 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 Sinhala
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Sinhala 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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Sinhala Multilingual Speech
Speech data covering multiple languages within one project, used for multilingual ASR, cross-lingual transfer, and language identification.
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Sinhala Noisy Speech
Speech collected under background noise — street, in-car, restaurant, office and other real environments — used for noise-robust models and speech enhancement.
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Sinhala 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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Sinhala 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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Sinhala Audiobook
Continuous long-form narration in audiobook style, steady in intonation and generous in duration, the main source material for high-quality TTS.
Read Speech in other languages
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Kurdish Read Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Hausa Read Speech
Sub-Saharan Africa
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Uzbek Read Speech
Central Asia & Caucasus
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Hindi Read Speech
South Asia
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Arabic (MSA) Read Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Indonesian Read Speech
Southeast Asia
Request Sinhala Read 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.