South Asia · India

Malayalam conversational speech dataset

500 hours of unscripted Malayalam conversation between pairs of native speakers, 50 vetted speakers in all, recorded in India. 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

LanguageMalayalam
Recorded inIndia
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$65 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 Malayalam speech:

  • Automatic speech recognition (ASR / STT)
  • Text-to-speech and voice synthesis prosody
  • Voice agents and IVR for India
  • 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 Malayalam. Our guide to conversational speech data explains why it matters.

Free samples

Audit the Malayalam 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 Malayalam speech dataset?

500 hours of unscripted conversation between pairs of native speakers, 50 vetted speakers in all, recorded in India. 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 Malayalam hard for speech recognition?

Written Malayalam joins words together, producing some of the longest words among Indian languages. It also keeps the "ഴ" (zh) sound alongside a full set of retroflex consonants, speech moves quickly, and English is mixed in often.

Is the Malayalam 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 Malayalam speech dataset cost?

$65 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.