Pricing · മലയാളം
Malayalam speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Malayalam speech data collection, why 5 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Malayalam (ml-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹4,200 – ₹8,200 / hour
- Speakers
- 35M
- Studio cities
- 5
Why Malayalam prices the way it does
Malayalam has roughly 35 million speakers concentrated in Kerala, Lakshadweep, Puducherry (Mahe), which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Budget higher transcription effort per audio hour for Malayalam than for Hindi; speech rate and morphology make it slower to annotate.
- Manglish is standard in urban and professional speech, with heavy English noun and verb insertion.
- Central Kerala news-reading dominates public data. Malabar and southern varieties, and fast conversational speech generally, are missing.
Worked budgets
| Volume | Typical speakers | Indicative range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 hours | 200 at 30 min | ₹4,20,000 – ₹8,20,000 | 3-6 weeks |
| 500 hours | 1,000 at 30 min | ₹19,32,000 – ₹37,72,000 | 6-10 weeks |
| 1,000 hours | 2,000 at 30 min | ₹35,70,000 – ₹69,70,000 | 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 Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi (central), Malabar / Kozhikode, Thrissur rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Malayalam transcription needs native reviewers, and Old vs new script (chillu characters, Unicode normalisation) mixed within a dataset is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: One of the most consonant-dense Indian languages; long geminates and clusters raise word error rates sharply, 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 Malayalam speech data?
Indicatively ₹4,200 to ₹8,200 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 Malayalam more expensive than Hindi?
Somewhat. Smaller recruitment pools mean more effort per speaker, which shows up as a higher per-hour rate rather than a longer timeline.
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 Malayalam dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Malayalam and you get a fixed price against it.