Audio annotation · ಕನ್ನಡ
Kannada Audio Annotation
Labelling of existing audio: speaker diarisation, emotion, intent, events, language identification and segment-level quality tagging, against your label schema. This page covers how that works specifically for Kannada, where north karnataka speech has markedly different intonation and lexicon from mysuru standard.
- Language
- Kannada (kn-IN)
- Dialects covered
- 5
- Typical programme
- 250-1,000 hours
- Cities
- Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi-Dharwad
What changes when the language is Kannada
The service specification stays constant across languages; the linguistics do not. For Kannada, three things drive the design of a audio annotation programme.
- North Karnataka speech has markedly different intonation and lexicon from Mysuru standard
- Dialect spread: Bangalore urban, Mysuru (standard literary), Dharwad / North Karnataka, Mangaluru coastal
- 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.
Technical specification
| Parameter | Standard |
|---|---|
| Label types | Diarisation, emotion, intent, events, language ID, quality |
| Granularity | Segment, utterance, or frame-level boundaries |
| Schema | Yours, or authored with you before work starts |
| Agreement | Multi-annotator overlap on a defined percentage |
| Tooling | Client tooling supported; otherwise our annotation workflow |
Kannada cohort design
Screen Bengaluru participants for native fluency and years of Karnataka residence; otherwise the cohort drifts towards second-language Kannada.
| Dimension | Typical split | Why it matters for Kannada |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Kannada forms that younger urban speakers have lost |
| Region | Karnataka / parts of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh 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
- Schema definition and edge-case documentation
- Annotator training and gold-set calibration
- Production annotation with gold items seeded in
- Adjudication of disagreements by a senior reviewer
- Delivery with per-label agreement statistics
Kannada-specific quality rules
- Northern lexical items replaced with standard equivalents
- Inconsistent transliteration of English technical terms
- Sandhi in connected speech transcribed as separate words by some annotators and joined by others
Gold items are seeded throughout production so drift is caught during the run, not at delivery.
Deliverables
- Labelled data in your schema
- Gold set and calibration results
- Per-label agreement statistics
- Edge-case log
Worked example
A representative Kannada audio annotation engagement: 250 hours from 500 speakers, 50/50 gender, ages 18-45, spread across Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi-Dharwad, recorded to the specification above and delivered in WAV with a per-utterance manifest.
Timeline: Scoped per label complexity; simple diarisation runs at roughly 3-5x real time.
Where this data is missing today
Mysuru/Bengaluru standard dominates. North Karnataka (Dharwad, Kalaburagi) and coastal Mangaluru speech are barely represented in any public corpus.
Frequently asked
How much does Kannada audio annotation cost?
Priced per delivered hour or unit against a written spec. The cost drivers for Kannada are dialect spread, demographic narrowness and recording condition, in that order.
Which Kannada dialects are included?
By default Bangalore urban, Mysuru (standard literary), Dharwad / North Karnataka, Mangaluru coastal and others, tagged per speaker. You can also commission a single-dialect corpus if you are targeting one region.
Can you deliver Kannada data in our format?
Yes. Labelled data in your schema is the default, but naming, schema and directory structure follow your pipeline.
How long does a Kannada programme take?
Scoped per label complexity; simple diarisation runs at roughly 3-5x real time.
Request a Kannada audio annotation quote
Hours, speakers, dialects, deadline. Send what you have.