Middle East · Saudi Arabia

Arabic (Gulf) conversational speech dataset

500 hours of unscripted Arabic (Gulf) conversation between pairs of native speakers, 50 vetted speakers in all, recorded in Saudi Arabia. Every recording is dual-channel, one speaker per channel, and comes with a time-aligned, human-verified transcript, speaker metadata (age, gender, region and recording device) and signed consent records, under a commercial license for ASR, TTS and voice AI training.

Dataset specifications

LanguageArabic (Gulf)
Recorded inSaudi Arabia
Speech typeSpontaneous two-person conversations
Volume500 hours
Speakers50 vetted native speakers
AudioDual-channel (one channel per speaker)
TranscriptsTime-aligned, human-verified
MetadataAge, gender, region, recording device
LicenseCommercial (training & evaluation)
Price$90 per hour of audio

Need more hours, another dialect or your own recording setup? We collect speech data to spec.

Built for

For teams training or testing speech models that have to cope with real Arabic (Gulf) speech:

  • Automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT)
  • Text-to-speech and voice synthesis prosody
  • Voice agents and IVR for Saudi Arabia
  • Speaker diarization and turn-taking models
  • Speech LLM and audio-understanding fine-tuning

Why conversational data?

Models trained on read speech lose accuracy on spontaneous audio, because hesitations, overlapping turns and natural speaking rates never made it into their training data. This dataset fills that gap for Arabic (Gulf). Our guide to conversational speech data explains why it matters.

Free samples

Audit the Arabic (Gulf) data yourself

Leave your details and the Spirelight team will email representative audio, matching transcripts and the metadata schema within 48 hours. Check recording quality, transcript accuracy and the speaker mix before you commit to anything.

No account, no verification code, no obligation.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is in the Arabic (Gulf) speech dataset?

500 hours of unscripted conversation between pairs of native speakers, 50 vetted speakers in all, recorded in Saudi Arabia. Each conversation is delivered as dual-channel audio with a time-aligned transcript, speaker metadata (age, gender, region and recording device) and the consent records behind it.

What makes Gulf Arabic hard for speech recognition?

Gulf Arabic departs from Modern Standard Arabic in sound ("q" is often "g", and "k" can become "ch"), in vocabulary and in grammar, and it has no fixed spelling. It also changes from country to country and region to region, which is why MSA-trained models miss much of it.

Is the Arabic (Gulf) dataset licensed for commercial use?

Yes. The license covers commercial training and evaluation of ASR, TTS and other voice AI models. Every speaker signed explicit consent to commercial use, and Spirelight shares the full consent records for your legal review.

What does the Arabic (Gulf) speech dataset cost?

$90 per hour of audio. Buying the full dataset, or several languages together, qualifies for a volume discount: ask for a quote.

Can I check samples before I buy?

Yes. Request samples on this page and the Spirelight team emails representative audio, matching transcripts and the metadata schema within 48 hours, so your team can audit the data before committing.