Tamil ASR datasets

Written and spoken Tamil are effectively two systems, and colloquial speech drops or merges a large share of the sounds the script writes. A transcript in the written form will not match the audio; a transcript in the spoken form needs a convention for how to write sounds that the script does not cleanly represent. Speaker region goes on every record, because Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and Malaysia differ audibly.

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What ASR work in Tamil requires

Transcription convention, decided first

Whether to write what was said or what should have been said is the single biggest source of disagreement between annotators. For this language the two diverge often enough that the convention has to be explicit.

Speaker count over hours

Recognition models overfit to voices faster than to vocabulary. A dataset that is long but narrow will test well on held-out audio from the same speakers and fail on anyone new.

Noise that matches deployment

If the model will run on phone audio in a city, training on studio recordings creates a mismatch that no amount of additional clean data fixes.

The mistake that costs the most

The most common mistake is specifying hours without specifying speakers, and then discovering at evaluation time that the model only works on the people who were recorded.

The language-specific factor

Written and spoken Tamil are two separate systems, and colloquial speech drops or merges a large share of sounds. Accents also differ across Tamil Nadu in India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, so speaker region has to be annotated on every record.

Specification checklist

LanguageTamil
Writing systemTamil
RegionSouth Asia
Core keywordASR dataset
Must specifyDistinct speaker count, recording conditions, annotation convention, delivery format
Included by defaultPilot batch, speaker metadata, consent documentation, annotation guideline

Related

  • Tamil speech data

    South Asia

    The full overview for this language, including what makes it hard to collect.

    • Dialect split
  • Multilingual speech

    Data category

    Running this alongside other languages in one delivery.

  • WER

    Glossary term

    How recognition quality is measured, and what the number does not tell you.

Request Tamil ASR data

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.

We reply within two business days. Your details are used only to answer this request. See our privacy policy.

  1. You send the spec Language, hours, recording conditions, and the deadline.
  2. We reply within two business days A real number and a real timeline, not a range.
  3. You approve a pilot batch A small run first, so problems surface before the full order.
  4. Full run, then delivery with documents Audio, transcripts, and the consent record for every speaker.
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