Pricing · हिन्दी
Hindi speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Hindi speech data collection, why 7 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Hindi (hi-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 528M
- Studio cities
- 7
Why Hindi prices the way it does
Hindi has roughly 528 million speakers concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Largest recruitment pool in the network. A 1,000-speaker Hindi cohort with balanced gender and 18-45 age bands is typically fielded across four cities to avoid a single-city accent bias.
- Urban Hindi speech is Hinglish in practice. Expect 15-40% English tokens in spontaneous speech: numbers, brands, technology terms, and whole clause switches. Any Hindi corpus that excludes English tokens will not match production traffic.
- Public Hindi corpora skew heavily towards read newspaper text from educated urban speakers in Delhi and NCR. Rural Bihar and eastern UP speech, elderly speakers, and low-literacy speakers reading prompts aloud are largely absent.
Worked budgets
| Volume | Typical speakers | Indicative range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 hours | 200 at 30 min | ₹3,20,000 – ₹6,50,000 | 3-6 weeks |
| 500 hours | 1,000 at 30 min | ₹14,72,000 – ₹29,90,000 | 6-10 weeks |
| 1,000 hours | 2,000 at 30 min | ₹27,20,000 – ₹55,25,000 | 10-16 weeks |
Unit rates fall with volume because setup, script design and recruiter onboarding are amortised, not because quality is relaxed.
Cost drivers specific to this language
- Dialect spread: covering Khari Boli, Awadhi, Braj, Bhojpuri-influenced Hindi rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Devanagari transcription needs native reviewers, and Inconsistent Devanagari vs romanised spelling for the same English loan word is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Four-way stop contrast (voiced/voiceless x aspirated/unaspirated) that collapses in models trained on English-first acoustic units, which requires reviewers trained on the language rather than generic annotators
Add-ons and their pricing
| Layer | Unit | Indicative |
|---|---|---|
| Verbatim transcription | per audio hour | ₹900 – ₹2,400 |
| Speaker diarisation and turn labels | per audio hour | ₹600 – ₹1,500 |
| Event and noise tagging | per audio hour | ₹400 – ₹1,100 |
| Romanised parallel transcript | per audio hour | ₹500 – ₹1,200 |
| Speaker-disjoint train/dev/test splits | one-off | Included |
How to get the number down without hurting the model
- Widen the age bands before you widen the dialect spread — dialect coverage is what determines production accuracy
- Use quiet-room capture where deployment audio is not studio-clean anyway
- Order transcription in a second phase once the audio passes acceptance
- Run a 10-20 hour pilot; specification errors caught there are the cheapest ones you will ever fix
Frequently asked
What is the per-hour rate for Hindi speech data?
Indicatively ₹3,200 to ₹6,500 per delivered hour for standard scripted or spontaneous capture with verbatim transcription. Narrow cohorts and studio-only capture sit at the top of that band.
Is Hindi more expensive than Hindi?
No — it sits in the same tier as Hindi, because the recruitment pool is deep enough to fill cohorts quickly in multiple cities.
Do you quote in INR or USD?
Either. Bands here are in INR; international clients are usually invoiced in USD at a fixed contract rate.
What is included in the quoted rate?
Recruitment, consent capture, recording, QA, transcription if ordered, metadata, delivery packaging and a perpetual licence with full IP transfer.
Related pages
Price a Hindi dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Hindi and you get a fixed price against it.