Pricing · தமிழ்
Tamil speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Tamil speech data collection, why 6 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Tamil (ta-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 82M
- Studio cities
- 6
Why Tamil prices the way it does
Tamil has roughly 82 million speakers concentrated in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, parts of Karnataka and Kerala, which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Recruit by district rather than by city alone; Chennai-only cohorts produce models that degrade sharply in the south and west of the state.
- Tanglish is the default urban register. Technology, finance, and workplace vocabulary is largely English embedded in Tamil syntax.
- Almost all public Tamil audio is literary read speech from news or scripture. Genuine colloquial Tamil, especially southern and Kongu varieties, is the single biggest gap for anyone building Tamil voice products.
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 Chennai (Madras Bashai), Kongu (Coimbatore), Madurai, Nellai (Tirunelveli) rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Tamil transcription needs native reviewers, and Transcribers normalising spoken Tamil into literary Tamil, destroying the acoustic-text alignment is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Extreme diglossia: written Tamil and spoken Tamil differ so much that read-speech corpora are near-useless for conversational ASR, 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 Tamil 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 Tamil 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 Tamil dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Tamil and you get a fixed price against it.