500 speakers of Urdu Spontaneous Speech

Speakers talk unscripted on prompted topics — describing a process, recounting an event, arguing a position — with a moderator who prompts but does not lead.

A 60-minute session covering six to eight topics, recorded continuously and segmented afterwards into utterances at natural pause boundaries.

Yield at this style: 60–70% of recorded time is accepted. Long silences, moderator speech and abandoned topics are cut in post, so recorded hours run well ahead of delivered hours. Budget for the gap.

• Topic banks graded by familiarity, so speakers across education and occupation bands all have something to say
• Open prompts only — anything answerable with yes or no produces thirty seconds of audio and a stalled session
• Culturally grounded topics per region, since a prompt that works in Mumbai can draw blank looks in Guwahati
• Topic rotation across the cohort so the corpus does not over-represent a handful of subjects
• Built against Urdu specifically: Shares most phonology with Hindi but adds Perso-Arabic phonemes (/q/, /x/, /ɣ/, /z/, /f/) that many speakers merge
• Code-mixing handled explicitly rather than edited out — Spoken Urdu and spoken Hindi are largely mutually intelligible; the distinction is mainly lexical and orthographic. Decide up front whether transcription is in Nastaliq, Devanagari, or both.

Six to eight weeks. Speaker-count targets front-load recruitment, so the coordinator team is proportionally larger than an equivalent hours-based build.

Four batches, each one a demographically complete slice rather than a convenient chunk, so early batches are usable for training on their own.

Fix the script decision before fielding; retro-transcribing a Nastaliq dataset into Devanagari after delivery costs as much as the original transcription pass.

At 500 speakers quotas are enforced per dialect and reconciled fortnightly. Aggregate demographics are reported per batch so drift is visible while there is still time to correct it.

Screening is for willingness to talk, not literacy, which opens the cohort to speakers a scripted protocol would exclude. Expect to over-recruit by 15% for speakers who freeze on the day.

• Shares most phonology with Hindi but adds Perso-Arabic phonemes (/q/, /x/, /ɣ/, /z/, /f/) that many speakers merge
• Spoken Urdu and spoken Hindi are largely mutually intelligible; the distinction is mainly lexical and orthographic. Decide up front whether transcription is in Nastaliq, Devanagari, or both.
• Indian Urdu specifically, and Dakhini in particular, are absent from public data dominated by Pakistani Urdu broadcast speech.

• Segment boundary review — bad boundaries produce truncated words that poison training more than they help
• Disfluency transcription consistency audited across transcribers, since conventions drift fast on this style
• Moderator speech confirmed absent from delivered segments
• Topic distribution checked per speaker so one dominant subject does not skew the language model
• Right-to-left Nastaliq tooling errors and diacritic loss
• Merged phonemes transcribed by sound rather than by etymology, or vice versa, inconsistently

100% technical QA, 15% content QA, plus mandatory duplicate-speaker detection across cities.

• Speakers who dry up after a minute, leaving sessions that look complete by duration but are mostly silence
• Drift into a reading register when a speaker becomes self-conscious about the microphone
• Moderator over-prompting, which turns a monologue corpus into an interview corpus
• Transcriber normalisation — quietly cleaning up disfluencies destroys the exact signal this style exists to capture

Cost at this band is driven by: Cohort breadth and screening depth, not recorded hours.

• Duplicate speakers across cities inflate the apparent cohort and quietly corrupt speaker-disjoint splits
• Recruiting for breadth tempts coordinators toward the easiest available demographic, which needs weekly quota audit
• Urdu carries 5 recognised varieties across Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar, so the quota matrix is wider than the headline volume suggests
• Indian Urdu specifically, and Dakhini in particular, are absent from public data dominated by Pakistani Urdu broadcast speech.

• WAV audio to your naming convention, with the per-file manifest
• Verbatim Perso-Arabic (Nastaliq) transcripts with utterance-level timestamps
• Filled-pause and false-start markers
• Segment offsets into the parent session file
• Topic label per segment
• Speech-rate and pause-density statistics per speaker
• 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

• Robust ASR for real user speech
• Language modelling on natural syntax
• Disfluency detection and removal
• Prosody and speech-rate modelling

Phonetic balance cannot be guaranteed — speakers say what they say. If you need specific phone contexts or a controlled lexicon, this style has to be paired with a scripted layer.