Marathi AI Training Data Collection

Marathi is not a variant of a language your model already handles. The specific properties below are the ones that show up as errors in production.

• Retains the retroflex lateral ळ, which has no Hindi or English equivalent and is frequently substituted with ल by non-native transcribers
• Affricates च and ज have both alveolar and palatal realisations depending on the word, a distinction lost in Devanagari orthography
• Pitch and vowel-length differences between Puneri and Varhadi shift the acoustic distribution enough to hurt cross-dialect ASR

Marathi has 6 varieties that matter for data collection. Collecting only the standard variety produces a model that works in the capital and fails everywhere else.

• Standard (Puneri)
• Varhadi (Vidarbha)
• Marathwadi
• Konkani-influenced coastal Marathi
• Ahirani
• Malvani

Mumbai and Pune speech mixes Marathi, Hindi, and English in the same sentence. Marathi-only recordings collected in Pune under-represent the Mumbai reality of tri-lingual switching.

Specify your expected English-token ratio in the brief. It is cheaper to collect the right mix than to filter the wrong one afterwards.

Available Marathi speech data is dominated by standard Puneri read speech. Vidarbha, Marathwada, and coastal Konkan varieties are severely under-collected, which is exactly where deployed voice products lose accuracy.

This is the practical reason to commission collection rather than assemble open corpora: the gap in the public data is exactly the part your users occupy.

These are the Marathi-specific decisions that go into the style guide before any transcriber starts work.

• ळ vs ल substitution by Hindi-trained transcribers
• Anusvara placement varies between conservative and modern orthography
• Varhadi verb endings get 'corrected' to standard forms unless the guide explicitly requires verbatim dialect transcription

• Phonetically balanced read prompts covering ळ, ण and retroflex clusters
• Agricultural, banking, and government-scheme domain utterances
• Spontaneous two-party conversation with natural Hindi/English switching
• Regional dialect elicitation sets recorded in Nagpur and Aurangabad

A representative Marathi cohort should be split roughly 40% western Maharashtra, 25% Vidarbha, 20% Marathwada, 15% Konkan rather than concentrated in Pune.

Marathi sessions run in Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Nashik, Aurangabad, Kolhapur. Multi-city fielding is the default because single-city cohorts carry an audible accent signature.

• 100% of delivered files pass automated technical QA for SNR, clipping, duration and silence
• 5-25% of files pass a second native-speaker content review, stratified by city, dialect and transcriber, and escalating to 100% on any batch that fails the agreed threshold
• Accepted yield runs 85-90% for scripted speech, 60-70% for spontaneous, 55-65% for conversational and 50-60% for telephony
• Default cohort quotas: 50/50 gender, with age bands at 30% (18-25), 40% (26-40) and 30% (41-60)
• 48 kHz / 24-bit capture, delivered as 16-bit PCM WAV, with studio sessions held below a -50 dBFS noise floor
• First response within one working day; a scoped, fixed quote within two to three

These are the figures a delivery is measured against, not aspirations. A batch that misses them is re-recorded at our cost rather than repaired.