Voice recording · اردو
Urdu Voice Recording for AI Training
Studio voice recording built for model training rather than broadcast: controlled acoustics, consistent mic distance, and reproducible session parameters across every speaker. 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 recording 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 |
|---|---|
| Sample rate | 48 kHz |
| Bit depth | 24-bit |
| Microphone | Large-diaphragm condenser, fixed distance, pop filter |
| Room | Treated booth, RT60 under 0.3s |
| Processing | None. No compression, EQ, or noise reduction on delivered audio |
| Session length | 30-90 minutes per speaker, with breaks logged |
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
- Session template definition so every studio in the network records identically
- Speaker briefing and pronunciation calibration
- Take-level monitoring with immediate re-record on defect
- Per-session technical report
- Delivery with unprocessed masters
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
Delivered audio is never processed. Training pipelines should see the raw capture so augmentation stays under your control.
Deliverables
- Unprocessed WAV masters
- Session logs
- Take-level metadata
- Speaker consent records
Worked example
A representative Urdu voice recording 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: 2-5 weeks depending on speaker count and city spread.
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 recording 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. Unprocessed WAV masters is the default, but naming, schema and directory structure follow your pipeline.
How long does a Urdu programme take?
2-5 weeks depending on speaker count and city spread.
Request a Urdu voice recording quote
Hours, speakers, dialects, deadline. Send what you have.