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Dataset specification · Pilot cohort

100 speakers of Hinglish Scripted Speech

A pilot cohort build of 100 speakers of Hinglish scripted speech. Establishing whether a cohort definition is recruitable at all before it is scaled. Speakers read prompts from a phonetically balanced script shown one line at a time, with retakes on any flubbed or misread line.

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Structured dataset packages ready for delivery — 100 speakers of Hinglish Scripted Speech
Volume
100 speakers
Scale
Pilot cohort
Per speaker
20–30 minutes of accepted audio per speaker
Accepted yield
85–90% of recorded time is accepted
01

How Hinglish scripted speech is captured

Speakers read prompts from a phonetically balanced script shown one line at a time, with retakes on any flubbed or misread line.

A 45-minute booth session yields roughly 300–400 prompts. One file per utterance, cut at the prompt boundary, so alignment is exact before any forced-alignment pass runs.

Yield at this style: 85–90% of recorded time is accepted. Prompt-level retakes catch problems inside the session, so very little is discarded afterwards. This is the highest-yield style we run.

Pilot cohort — what the build is actually made ofCitiesOneStudiosA single treated roomRecruitersOne coordinatorAudio yield~50 hours at 30 minutes…Sessions per day6–8Team1 coordinator, 2 engine…
02

The specification

FieldValue
LanguageHinglish (hi-Latn-IN, Devanagari + Latin)
Volume100 speakers
Equivalent50 hours at 30 minutes per speaker
Speech typeScripted Speech
Per speaker20–30 minutes of accepted audio per speaker
File granularityOne WAV per prompt, named by prompt ID and speaker ID
Prompt coverageTriphone-balanced script with digit, date, name and domain-lexicon blocks
Leading/trailing silence200 ms padded, verified automatically on every file
AlignmentPrompt text is ground truth; deviations are flagged rather than silently corrected
DialectsDelhi corporate Hinglish, Mumbai Bambaiya, Call-centre register, Youth/social media register
TranscriptionVerbatim, native-speaker, second-pass reviewed
Two speakers recording natural conversational speech data — supporting 100 speakers of hinglish scripted speech
Two speakers recording natural conversational speech data
03

Designing the script for Hinglish

  • Script built for triphone coverage rather than word coverage, so rare phone contexts appear often enough to train on
  • Digit strings, dates, currency and person names blocked separately, because these are where deployed ASR actually fails
  • Domain lexicon injected from your product vocabulary when you supply one
  • Sentence-length distribution spread deliberately, since all-short prompts produce a model that cannot handle long utterances
  • Built against Hinglish specifically: Intra-sentential switching means English words carry Indian phonology, so English acoustic models mis-transcribe them
  • Code-mixing handled explicitly rather than edited out — Hinglish is the code-mixing case itself. Typical urban customer-support speech is 30-60% English tokens embedded in Hindi grammar, with switching several times per utterance.
04

Running a pilot cohort Hinglish build

Three to four weeks, almost entirely determined by how narrow the screening criteria are.

A single delivery with the full demographic report, since the cohort report is the point of a build this size.

Recruit by switching behaviour, not by language proficiency. Screening recordings are used to confirm speakers switch naturally rather than performing one language.

ParameterAt this volume
CitiesOne — Delhi, Gurugram
StudiosA single treated room
RecruitersOne coordinator
Audio yield~50 hours at 30 minutes per speaker
Sessions per day6–8
Team1 coordinator, 2 engineers, 3 transcribers
05

Cohort design

At 100 speakers the cohort is deliberately simplified: two or three dialect groups rather than the full spread, with quotas enforced in aggregate. A build this size cannot support per-cell targets and should not claim to.

Requires literate speakers comfortable reading aloud in the target script, which is the main constraint on cohort breadth and has to be actively counterweighted.

DimensionTypical splitWhy it matters for Hinglish
Gender50 / 50Pitch range differences change acoustic model behaviour; unbalanced cohorts bias recognition
Age18-25: 30%, 26-40: 40%, 41-60: 30%Older speakers retain conservative Hinglish forms that younger urban speakers have lost
RegionDelhi NCR / Mumbai / Bengaluru and othersDialect spread across 4 recognised varieties
EducationMixed, including below-graduatePrompt-reading fluency correlates with education and skews prosody
ConditionStudio / quiet room / fieldMatch the noise profile of your deployment
06

Hinglish-specific considerations

  • Intra-sentential switching means English words carry Indian phonology, so English acoustic models mis-transcribe them
  • Hinglish is the code-mixing case itself. Typical urban customer-support speech is 30-60% English tokens embedded in Hindi grammar, with switching several times per utterance.
  • Almost no public corpus contains genuine intra-sentential Hindi-English switching with per-token language tags. This is the highest-value gap for anyone building Indian conversational AI.
07

Quality gates for scripted speech

  • Prompt-to-audio match verified by a native reviewer; a misread line is a rejected file, not an edited transcript
  • Hyperarticulation flagged — a speaker over-enunciating because they are reading produces audio that does not match deployment
  • Clipping and truncation checked at both utterance boundaries
  • Per-speaker prompt coverage confirmed, so no speaker silently skips a block
  • Whether English tokens are written in Latin or transliterated into Devanagari must be fixed by rule, not left to annotators
  • Language-ID tagging per token is required for training but is skipped by most vendors

100% content QA, plus per-speaker demographic verification against the screening record.

08

What goes wrong on scripted speech sessions

  • Reading voice: flat prosody and unnatural stress that trains a model on speech nobody actually produces
  • Prompt fatigue in the back half of long sessions, where accuracy drops and pace flattens
  • Speakers who are not fluent readers, which quietly biases the cohort toward higher education bands
  • Script leakage across speakers, producing a corpus that memorises sentences instead of covering sounds
09

Risks at pilot cohort in Hinglish

Cost at this band is driven by: Screening narrowness dominates; the recording itself is a minor cost at this size.

  • Narrow criteria can make a cohort unrecruitable at any price, which is exactly what this band exists to find out
  • 100 speakers cannot support per-dialect evaluation — treat the results as directional
  • Hinglish carries 4 recognised varieties across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, so the quota matrix is wider than the headline volume suggests
  • Almost no public corpus contains genuine intra-sentential Hindi-English switching with per-token language tags. This is the highest-value gap for anyone building Indian conversational AI.
10

Deliverables

  • WAV audio to your naming convention, with the per-file manifest
  • Verbatim Devanagari + Latin transcripts with utterance-level timestamps
  • Prompt ID mapped to every utterance
  • Verbatim deviation flags where the speaker departed from the script
  • Per-utterance SNR and duration in the manifest
  • Per-speaker metadata: age band, gender, region, dialect, education band
  • Consent records mapped to speaker IDs
  • QA report with pass rates, rejection reasons and agreement statistics
  • Speaker-disjoint train / dev / test splits on request
11

What this trains, and what it does not

  • ASR acoustic model baselines
  • TTS voice building where a single speaker is recorded at depth
  • Pronunciation lexicon and G2P validation
  • Forced-alignment and phone-boundary work

Scripted audio contains no disfluencies, no false starts and no natural turn-taking. A model trained on it alone degrades sharply on real spontaneous input, so it is a baseline layer rather than a complete training set.

Frequently asked

Is 100 speakers of Hinglish enough?

Enough to prove a cohort definition works and to build a small speaker-verification or accent test set. Not enough for per-dialect statistics.

Why scripted speech rather than another speech type?

ASR acoustic model baselines, TTS voice building where a single speaker is recorded at depth, Pronunciation lexicon and G2P validation are what this style is the right input for. Scripted audio contains no disfluencies, no false starts and no natural turn-taking. A model trained on it alone degrades sharply on real spontaneous input, so it is a baseline layer rather than a complete training set.

How long does a pilot cohort Hinglish build take?

Three to four weeks, almost entirely determined by how narrow the screening criteria are. A single delivery with the full demographic report, since the cohort report is the point of a build this size.

What does 100 speakers of Hinglish scripted speech cost?

Quoted per delivered hour against this specification. At this band the drivers are screening narrowness dominates; the recording itself is a minor cost at this size. Send the spec and you get one fixed figure.

How much QA is applied at this volume?

100% content QA, plus per-speaker demographic verification against the screening record.

Quote this Hinglish dataset

100 speakers, scripted speech, Hinglish — pilot cohort. Adjust anything and send it.

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