ASR datasets · বাংলা
Bengali ASR Training Data
Transcribed speech corpora built to train and evaluate automatic speech recognition, with verbatim transcription, timestamps and per-token language tagging where code-mixing occurs. This page covers how that works specifically for Bengali, where inherent vowel is realised as /ɔ/ or /o/, which breaks g2p rules copied from devanagari-based systems.
- Language
- Bengali (bn-IN)
- Dialects covered
- 5
- Typical programme
- 500-2,000 hours
- Cities
- Kolkata, Siliguri, Durgapur
What changes when the language is Bengali
The service specification stays constant across languages; the linguistics do not. For Bengali, three things drive the design of a asr datasets programme.
- Inherent vowel is realised as /ɔ/ or /o/, which breaks G2P rules copied from Devanagari-based systems
- Dialect spread: Kolkata standard (Rarhi), Sylheti-influenced, Rangpuri / North Bengal, Medinipuri
- Kolkata professional speech mixes English heavily; rural West Bengal much less. A single 'Bengali' dataset without register tags conflates two very different acoustic and lexical distributions.
Technical specification
| Parameter | Standard |
|---|---|
| Audio | 16 kHz or 48 kHz PCM WAV |
| Transcription | Verbatim, including disfluencies, false starts and fillers |
| Timestamps | Utterance level by default; word level on request |
| Tagging | Noise, overlap, unintelligible, foreign-language and code-switch tags |
| Normalisation | Raw and normalised text columns delivered separately |
| Split | Train/dev/test splits with no speaker leakage across splits |
Bengali cohort design
Tag every speaker as Indian Bengali and record district of origin; mixing in Bangladeshi speech without tags is a common and costly dataset defect.
| Dimension | Typical split | Why it matters for Bengali |
|---|---|---|
| Gender | 50 / 50 | Pitch range differences change acoustic model behaviour; unbalanced cohorts bias recognition |
| Age | 18-25: 30%, 26-40: 40%, 41-60: 30% | Older speakers retain conservative Bengali forms that younger urban speakers have lost |
| Region | West Bengal / Tripura / Assam (Barak Valley) and others | Dialect spread across 5 recognised varieties |
| Education | Mixed, including below-graduate | Prompt-reading fluency correlates with education and skews prosody |
| Condition | Studio / quiet room / field | Match the noise profile of your deployment |
Process
- Style guide authored per language, covering numerals, loanwords, script and disfluency rules
- Transcriber calibration round with inter-annotator agreement measurement
- First-pass transcription
- Second-pass native review
- Automated consistency checks against the style guide
- Split generation with speaker-disjoint partitions
Bengali-specific quality rules
- Three sibilant characters chosen inconsistently for the same sound
- Bangladeshi vs Indian Bengali orthographic conventions mixed within one dataset
- Verb conjugation register (cholit vs sadhu) normalised by transcribers
Agreement is measured, not assumed. We report word-level agreement on a held-out sample so you can judge label quality before training on it.
Deliverables
- Audio plus aligned transcripts (JSON/TSV, or your schema)
- Style guide as delivered documentation
- Inter-annotator agreement report
- Speaker-disjoint train/dev/test splits
Worked example
A representative Bengali asr datasets engagement: 500 hours from 1,000 speakers, 50/50 gender, ages 18-45, spread across Kolkata, Siliguri, Durgapur, recorded to the specification above and delivered in WAV with a per-utterance manifest.
Timeline: Transcription adds roughly 1-2 weeks per 100 hours after recording, per language.
Where this data is missing today
Indian Bengali is under-collected relative to Bangladeshi Bengali, and North Bengal and Tripura varieties are almost entirely missing.
Frequently asked
How much does Bengali asr datasets cost?
Priced per delivered hour or unit against a written spec. The cost drivers for Bengali are dialect spread, demographic narrowness and recording condition, in that order.
Which Bengali dialects are included?
By default Kolkata standard (Rarhi), Sylheti-influenced, Rangpuri / North Bengal, Medinipuri and others, tagged per speaker. You can also commission a single-dialect corpus if you are targeting one region.
Can you deliver Bengali data in our format?
Yes. Audio plus aligned transcripts (JSON/TSV, or your schema) is the default, but naming, schema and directory structure follow your pipeline.
How long does a Bengali programme take?
Transcription adds roughly 1-2 weeks per 100 hours after recording, per language.
Request a Bengali asr datasets quote
Hours, speakers, dialects, deadline. Send what you have.