Pricing · Hinglish
Hinglish speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Hinglish speech data collection, why 4 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Hinglish (hi-Latn-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 350M
- Studio cities
- 7
Why Hinglish prices the way it does
Hinglish has roughly 350 million speakers concentrated in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Recruit by switching behaviour, not by language proficiency. Screening recordings are used to confirm speakers switch naturally rather than performing one language.
- Hinglish is the code-mixing case itself. Typical urban customer-support speech is 30-60% English tokens embedded in Hindi grammar, with switching several times per utterance.
- Almost no public corpus contains genuine intra-sentential Hindi-English switching with per-token language tags. This is the highest-value gap for anyone building Indian conversational AI.
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 Delhi corporate Hinglish, Mumbai Bambaiya, Call-centre register, Youth/social media register rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Devanagari + Latin transcription needs native reviewers, and Whether English tokens are written in Latin or transliterated into Devanagari must be fixed by rule, not left to annotators is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Intra-sentential switching means English words carry Indian phonology, so English acoustic models mis-transcribe them, 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 Hinglish 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 Hinglish 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 Hinglish dataset
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