Free Kannada speech data sample

• Kannada audio from at least four speakers with a mixed gender and age spread
• Coverage of Bangalore urban, Mysuru (standard literary), Dharwad / North Karnataka where your spec calls for dialect breadth
• Verbatim transcripts in Kannada, 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

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.

• Run it through your existing ASR or TTS pipeline and read the error breakdown by speaker and dialect
• Check how Kannada code-mixing is transcribed: Bengaluru is a migration city: Kannada speech there is mixed with English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Native-only Kannada cohorts recruited in Bengaluru are hard to fill without screening for years of residence.
• Check the transcription convention against your tokeniser — Northern lexical items replaced with standard equivalents is the usual failure point
• Confirm the metadata is complete enough to filter and stratify by

Kannada has roughly 59 million speakers across Karnataka, parts of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and models trained on generic multilingual data typically fail on the same things each time.

Mysuru/Bengaluru standard dominates. North Karnataka (Dharwad, Kalaburagi) and coastal Mangaluru speech are barely represented in any public corpus.

• Phonetics your acoustic model may not have seen: North Karnataka speech has markedly different intonation and lexicon from Mysuru standard
• Utterance types worth sampling separately: Dialect-tagged spontaneous conversation across five zones, Read prompts balanced for retroflex and geminate consonants, Ride-hailing, delivery and fintech domain command sets
• Recording geography in the sample: Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi-Dharwad

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.

Screen Bengaluru participants for native fluency and years of Karnataka residence; otherwise the cohort drifts towards second-language Kannada.