Pilot
Start with a paid pilot
A 10-20 hour pilot recorded against your real specification, delivered under full commercial licence, with the cost credited against the production run if you proceed.
- Size
- 10-20 hours or equivalent
- Timeline
- 1-2 weeks
- Licence
- Full commercial, perpetual
- Credit
- Applied to the production order
Why a pilot beats a bigger first order
Almost every expensive failure in a data programme is a specification failure discovered at scale. A pilot moves that discovery to the cheapest possible point: you train on the pilot, find what the spec got wrong, and fix it before a thousand hours are recorded to the wrong standard.
It also tells you something a sample cannot — whether our recruitment, QA and reporting hold up under a real cohort with real quotas.
What a pilot includes
- A real cohort against your quota design, not our easiest speakers
- The exact acoustic and annotation specification you would use in production
- A QA report in the production format, including agreement figures and quota compliance
- Full commercial licence and IP transfer on the pilot data itself
- A written debrief on what we would change in the production spec, including anything that will cost you more
Pilot to production
| Stage | Duration | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Specification workshop | 2-3 days | Written spec, cohort design, acceptance thresholds |
| Pilot collection | 5-7 days | 10-20 delivered units with metadata |
| QA and debrief | 3-4 days | QA report and recommended spec changes |
| Production quote | 1 day | Fixed price and schedule against the revised spec |
If you proceed within 90 days, the pilot fee is credited in full against the production invoice.
Free sample or paid pilot?
| Free sample | Paid pilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | ~30 minutes | 10-20 hours |
| Cohort | Indicative speakers | Your real quota design |
| Licence | Evaluation only | Full commercial |
| QA report | Short | Production format |
| Cost | Free | Quoted, credited on proceed |
| Answers | Is the audio any good? | Is the specification right? |
Frequently asked
How much does a pilot cost?
It is quoted against the same rate bands as production, at pilot volume. Because setup cost is not amortised, the per-hour figure is higher — and it is credited back in full if you proceed within 90 days.
Can we train on pilot data?
Yes. Pilot delivery carries full commercial licence and IP transfer, so it goes into your training set like any other batch.
What if the pilot fails?
If it fails our acceptance standard we re-collect at our cost. If it meets the standard but tells you the specification was wrong, that is the pilot doing its job — you owe nothing further.
Do we have to run a pilot?
No. Buyers with a settled specification and prior experience of Indian corpora often go straight to production.
Related pages
Scope a pilot
Send the language, volume and quality bar you are considering. We come back with a pilot scope, a price and what it would prove.