Sample · বাংলা
Free Bengali speech data sample
Thirty minutes of Bengali audio, recorded to your specification with transcripts and full metadata, at no cost. It exists so you can judge us on files rather than on claims.
- Sample size
- ~30 minutes
- Cost
- Free
- Turnaround
- 5-8 working days
- Formats
- WAV 48 kHz + transcript + metadata
What the sample contains
- Bengali audio from at least four speakers with a mixed gender and age spread
- Coverage of Kolkata standard (Rarhi), Sylheti-influenced, Rangpuri / North Bengal where your spec calls for dialect breadth
- Verbatim transcripts in Bengali, with a romanised parallel transcript on request
- Per-file metadata: speaker ID, age band, gender, district, device, environment and SNR
- A short QA report showing how the files were checked before they were sent
How to specify it
| Decision | Options | Default if you do not say |
|---|---|---|
| Speech type | Scripted / spontaneous / conversational / telephony | Scripted plus a spontaneous block |
| Environment | Studio / quiet room / field / call path | Studio and quiet room, split |
| Sample rate | 48 kHz, 16 kHz, 8 kHz | 48 kHz mastered, 16 kHz derived |
| Dialects | Kolkata standard (Rarhi), Sylheti-influenced, Rangpuri / North Bengal | Standard variety plus one regional |
| Annotation | Verbatim / timestamps / speaker turns / event tags | Verbatim with timestamps |
The sample is only useful if it looks like the data you would actually buy. Send the spec you would put in a purchase order and we record against that.
What to test it against
- Run it through your existing ASR or TTS pipeline and read the error breakdown by speaker and dialect
- Check how Bengali code-mixing is transcribed: 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.
- Check the transcription convention against your tokeniser — Three sibilant characters chosen inconsistently for the same sound is the usual failure point
- Confirm the metadata is complete enough to filter and stratify by
What a Bengali sample usually exposes
Bengali has roughly 97 million speakers across West Bengal, Tripura, Assam (Barak Valley), and models trained on generic multilingual data typically fail on the same things each time.
Indian Bengali is under-collected relative to Bangladeshi Bengali, and North Bengal and Tripura varieties are almost entirely missing.
- Phonetics your acoustic model may not have seen: Inherent vowel is realised as /ɔ/ or /o/, which breaks G2P rules copied from Devanagari-based systems
- Utterance types worth sampling separately: Cholit-bhasha spontaneous conversation, Read prompts covering cluster simplification, Regional dialect sets from North Bengal and Tripura
- Recording geography in the sample: Kolkata, Siliguri, Durgapur
What happens after
Nothing automatic. If the sample works, we scope the full build against the same specification and quote a fixed price. If it does not, tell us what failed — that feedback is more useful to us than a polite no.
Tag every speaker as Indian Bengali and record district of origin; mixing in Bangladeshi speech without tags is a common and costly dataset defect.
Frequently asked
Is the Bengali sample really free?
Yes. There is no charge and no obligation. We cap it at roughly 30 minutes because that is enough to judge quality without becoming an unpaid production run.
Can we use the sample data commercially?
The sample is licensed for evaluation. Full commercial rights and IP transfer come with a paid delivery, including a paid pilot.
How long does it take?
Five to eight working days from an agreed specification, depending on how narrow the speaker cohort is.
Can we specify our own script?
Yes. Send your prompts, wake words or domain vocabulary and we record those instead of our standard set.
Related pages
Request your free Bengali sample
Send the specification you would buy against. Thirty minutes of audio, transcripts and metadata come back within a week.