Voice evaluation · اردو
Urdu AI Voice Evaluation
Human evaluation of your speech models: MOS and preference testing for TTS, WER-in-context review for ASR, and native-speaker judgement on naturalness and intelligibility. This page covers how that works specifically for Urdu, where shares most phonology with hindi but adds perso-arabic phonemes (/q/, /x/, /ɣ/, /z/, /f/) that many speakers merge.
- Language
- Urdu (ur-IN)
- Dialects covered
- 5
- Typical programme
- 250-1,000 hours
- Cities
- Hyderabad, Lucknow, Delhi
What changes when the language is Urdu
The service specification stays constant across languages; the linguistics do not. For Urdu, three things drive the design of a voice evaluation programme.
- Shares most phonology with Hindi but adds Perso-Arabic phonemes (/q/, /x/, /ɣ/, /z/, /f/) that many speakers merge
- Dialect spread: Dakhini (Hyderabad), Lucknawi, Dehlvi, Bihari Urdu
- Spoken Urdu and spoken Hindi are largely mutually intelligible; the distinction is mainly lexical and orthographic. Decide up front whether transcription is in Nastaliq, Devanagari, or both.
Technical specification
| Parameter | Standard |
|---|---|
| TTS | MOS (1-5), MUSHRA, and A/B preference protocols |
| ASR | Error typing: substitution, deletion, insertion, code-switch failure |
| Panel | Native speakers of the target variety, screened and calibrated |
| Sample size | Powered per the effect size you need to detect |
| Reporting | Per-item scores plus aggregate with confidence intervals |
Urdu cohort design
Fix the script decision before fielding; retro-transcribing a Nastaliq dataset into Devanagari after delivery costs as much as the original transcription pass.
| Dimension | Typical split | Why it matters for Urdu |
|---|---|---|
| Gender | 50 / 50 | Pitch range differences change acoustic model behaviour; unbalanced cohorts bias recognition |
| Age | 18-25: 30%, 26-40: 40%, 41-60: 30% | Older speakers retain conservative Urdu forms that younger urban speakers have lost |
| Region | Uttar Pradesh / Telangana / Bihar and others | Dialect spread across 5 recognised varieties |
| Education | Mixed, including below-graduate | Prompt-reading fluency correlates with education and skews prosody |
| Condition | Studio / quiet room / field | Match the noise profile of your deployment |
Process
- Protocol design and sample-size calculation
- Panel recruitment and calibration on reference items
- Blind evaluation with attention checks
- Statistical analysis
- Report with per-error-type breakdown
Urdu-specific quality rules
- Right-to-left Nastaliq tooling errors and diacritic loss
- Merged phonemes transcribed by sound rather than by etymology, or vice versa, inconsistently
- Dakhini forms replaced with standard Urdu
Attention checks and reference anchors are embedded so unreliable raters are detected and excluded before analysis.
Deliverables
- Raw per-rater scores
- Aggregated results with confidence intervals
- Error-type analysis
- Recommended fix priorities
Worked example
A representative Urdu voice evaluation engagement: 250 hours from 500 speakers, 50/50 gender, ages 18-45, spread across Hyderabad, Lucknow, Delhi, recorded to the specification above and delivered in WAV with a per-utterance manifest.
Timeline: 1-3 weeks per evaluation round.
Where this data is missing today
Indian Urdu specifically, and Dakhini in particular, are absent from public data dominated by Pakistani Urdu broadcast speech.
Frequently asked
How much does Urdu voice evaluation cost?
Priced per delivered hour or unit against a written spec. The cost drivers for Urdu are dialect spread, demographic narrowness and recording condition, in that order.
Which Urdu dialects are included?
By default Dakhini (Hyderabad), Lucknawi, Dehlvi, Bihari Urdu and others, tagged per speaker. You can also commission a single-dialect corpus if you are targeting one region.
Can you deliver Urdu data in our format?
Yes. Raw per-rater scores is the default, but naming, schema and directory structure follow your pipeline.
How long does a Urdu programme take?
1-3 weeks per evaluation round.
Request a Urdu voice evaluation quote
Hours, speakers, dialects, deadline. Send what you have.