Pricing · తెలుగు
Telugu speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Telugu speech data collection, why 4 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Telugu (te-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 96M
- Studio cities
- 5
Why Telugu prices the way it does
Telugu has roughly 96 million speakers concentrated in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, parts of Karnataka and Odisha, which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Split cohorts explicitly between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and tag every speaker; models trained without the tag cannot be evaluated per region.
- Hyderabad speech mixes Telugu, Urdu/Deccani, Hindi and English. A Telugu dataset for Hyderabad deployment must include Urdu-origin vocabulary.
- Coastal Andhra read speech dominates. Telangana rural and Rayalaseema speech is thin, despite Hyderabad being the largest deployment market.
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 Telangana, Coastal Andhra (Godavari), Rayalaseema, Srikakulam rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Telugu transcription needs native reviewers, and Telangana forms normalised to Coastal Andhra standard is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Vowel-length contrasts are phonemic and short/long confusion changes meaning outright, 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 Telugu 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 Telugu 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 Telugu dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Telugu and you get a fixed price against it.