Nepali speech dataset, roughly 500 hours ready to license
Our OTS Nepali speech dataset is roughly 500 hours of Nepali speech, prompts and conversations, already recorded by Nepali speakers in our 30,000+ network, with consent from every speaker for commercial AI training. License it now and train your Nepali speech recognition model without waiting on a new collection.
- ~500 h of Nepali in stock
- ~35,000 h across the OTS pool
- 100% of speakers consented
- ISO 27001 certified
- SOC 2 report under NDA
- GDPR DPAs and HIPAA BAAs on request
What's in the Nepali speech dataset?
The IndecalAI OTS Nepali speech dataset is roughly 500 hours of Nepali speech, prompts and conversations, recorded by Nepali speakers in our network who all consented to commercial AI training. It's already recorded, so you can license it now instead of waiting on a new collection.
Nepali serves Nepal, northeast India and a large workforce abroad, with growing use of mobile banking and remittance apps. Speech data for it is scarce, which makes licensed hours valuable.
Every recording comes with a transcript and metadata about the speaker, the device and the setting, and you can take it as WAV, OGG or another common format. Every order starts with sample clips and a spec sheet, so you can match the data against your model before you agree a licence.
Need more than what's in stock? Nepali speakers from our 30,000+ network record new speech to your brief, and our Nepali data page covers what we collect to order.
Nepali speech dataset at a glance
- Hours
- Roughly 500 hours, already recorded
- Language
- Nepali (नेपाली), ne
- Content
- Speech, prompts and conversations
- Consent
- Every speaker consented to commercial AI training
- Speakers
- Nepali speakers from our 30,000+ network
- Audio and transcripts
- Transcripts and metadata with every recording, in WAV, OGG and more
- Licence
- Terms agreed with each customer, in writing
- Price
- Quoted per order
- Samples
- Nepali sample clips sent in reply to your request
- Security
- ISO 27001 certified. SOC 2 report available under NDA. GDPR DPAs and HIPAA BAAs on request.
What comes with every Nepali recording
What you get with each Nepali recording, and how it was made. The spec sheet adds the numbers for your order.
| Detail | In the Nepali dataset |
|---|---|
| Speech types | A mix of scripted prompts and natural conversations |
| Recording devices | Mobile phones, laptops and studio microphones |
| Environments | Quiet rooms and noisy, everyday settings |
| Transcripts | Included with every recording |
| Speaker metadata | Speaker details, such as gender and age, for each recording |
| Recording metadata | The device and the setting for each recording |
| Audio formats | WAV, OGG and other common formats |
| Sample rates | Listed for each recording on the spec sheet |
What roughly 500 hours of Nepali speech looks like
Roughly 500 hours sounds abstract until you play it: about 21 days of Nepali speech without a pause. That's why we send sample clips and a spec sheet first, so you can judge the whole from a part.
- ~500 hours of Nepali speech
- ~30,000 minutes
- ~1.8M seconds of audio
- ~21 days, played back to back
Hours here are recorded audio. When you compare quotes, check whether each one counts audio hours or only the parts where someone is talking.
Nepali at a glance, for speech teams
The facts that shape a Nepali speech project, from who speaks it to how it's written. Our Nepali data page covers what we collect to order.
Status
Official language
Official in Nepal, and one of India's scheduled languages, spoken in Sikkim, Darjeeling and Bhutan.
Where it's spoken
Nepal and northeast India
The official language of Nepal, spoken in Sikkim and West Bengal, and by communities in Bhutan and the Gulf.
Script
देवनागरी Devanagari
Written left to right in Devanagari, the same script as Hindi.
Family
Indo-Aryan
An Indo-Aryan language, related to Hindi, with words from Tibeto-Burman languages.
Varieties
Standard and regional
Kathmandu speech is the standard, and many speakers have another first language like Maithili or Newar.
Codes
ne · nep
ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3 codes. Locales speech APIs often use: ne-NP, ne-IN.
Nepali speech dataset, voice dataset or speech corpus?
Speech dataset, voice dataset, corpus: the names overlap. Here's how they differ, and where our Nepali data sits.
Nepali speech dataset
The general term
Recorded Nepali speech with details about each recording, for training and testing speech models. The name this page uses.
Nepali voice dataset
Usually the same thing
Some teams mean voice for text-to-speech or speaker recognition, which needs cleaner audio. Part of our data was recorded in a studio, so ask for those recordings.
Nepali audio dataset
A wider term
It can include music or background sound. Ours is speech audio: Nepali speech, prompts and conversations.
Nepali speech corpus
The research name
A structured collection of recordings and their details. Commercial datasets are corpora too, licensed instead of published.
Nepali ASR or speech-to-text dataset
Speech plus what was said
For training a model that turns Nepali audio into text. Every recording in our Nepali dataset comes with a transcript.
Nepali speech recognition data
Speech plus what was said
For training a model that turns Nepali audio into text. Every recording in our Nepali dataset comes with a transcript.
What makes Nepali hard for speech recognition
Four things that catch out Nepali speech models, and what to listen for when you check a sample from anyone, us included.
English words inside Nepali sentences
Nepali speakers mix in English for banking, tech and work, and Hindi words too. A model trained only on formal Nepali stumbles on that, so listen for it in a sample.
Devanagari or Roman
Nepali is written in Devanagari, but many people type it in Latin letters. Decide which script your model should output, then check the transcripts.
Accents across Nepali speakers
Kathmandu, eastern and western Nepal, and Darjeeling speech carry different sounds. Check that the speaker mix covers the regions your users come from.
Honorific levels
Nepali changes pronouns and verbs with respect, from timi to tapai to hajur. A voice bot has to hear and use the right level.
What teams build with a Nepali speech dataset
Where ready-recorded Nepali speech tends to go. These are kinds of work, not client names.
Nepali speech recognition
Train or fine-tune a Nepali speech-to-text model, or adapt a multilingual model so it handles Nepali well.
Voice bots and IVR
Teach a voice bot how Nepali callers actually ask for things, in the words and accents they use.
Customer service calls
Nepali speech for models that route, transcribe or summarize customer calls about accounts, orders and claims.
Voice in the car and at home
A Nepali base for in-car assistants and smart devices, before recording commands in the real setting.
Support and speech analytics
Nepali conversations for models that find intent, sentiment or topics in support calls and chats.
Testing a Nepali model
Held-back Nepali recordings your model never trained on, to measure word and character error rate before launch.
How many hours of Nepali speech do you need?
It depends on the model you start from and how close your users sound to the training data. These are rough starting points that come up often in speech work. Your own tests should decide.
| Goal | Rough starting point | With our Nepali data |
|---|---|---|
| Test a model you already have | A few hours your model never trained on | A test set cut from stock and kept out of training |
| Fine-tune a multilingual model, such as Whisper or wav2vec 2.0 | Tens to a few hundred hours | Roughly 500 hours in stock covers it |
| Adapt to one domain, like banking calls | A smaller set that sounds like your users | Stock as a base, plus a custom top-up in your domain |
| Train a Nepali model from scratch | Thousands of hours | Stock as a base, plus a larger custom collection |
Free Nepali speech datasets or a licensed one?
Public corpora such as OpenSLR Nepali, Mozilla Common Voice and FLEURS have done a lot for Nepali speech research. They cover what their creators chose to record, like read sentences, crowd recordings or broadcast speech, and each comes with its own licence and terms of use. Here's how they compare with a licensed dataset.
| Topic | Public Nepali corpora | Our Nepali speech dataset |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Set by each corpus, and some limit redistribution or changes | Agreed with you in writing, for what you're building |
| Consent | Covered by each project's own terms | Every speaker consented to commercial AI training |
| What it sounds like | Whatever the project recorded | Speech, prompts and conversations, with sample clips first |
| Who else trains on it | Anyone who downloads it | Set in the licence we agree with you |
| Filling gaps | Up to you | Recorded to your brief by the same network |
| Support | Community forums | A named contact from sample to delivery |
How to check a Nepali speech sample
Half an hour with the Nepali clips and the spec sheet answers most questions. The list works for any vendor, not only us.
| Check | What to look for | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Accents | Speakers from the regions your users come from | The speaker mix on the spec sheet, and the clips |
| Everyday speech | The way your users really talk, including any mixing with other languages | Listen to the clips |
| Script | Transcripts in the script and spelling your model should output | The transcript format on the spec sheet |
| Audio | A sample rate and recording setup close to your product | The sample rate on the spec sheet |
| Numbers | Amounts, dates and phone numbers written one consistent way | Transcripts of the clips |
| Rights | Consent that covers commercial AI training, and a licence that fits | Ask for the licence terms before you buy |
From Nepali sample clips to licensed data
Your named contact runs it from the first question to delivery.
-
01
Ask
Tell us how many Nepali hours you need and what the model is for.
You get A reply within one business day
-
02
Sample and spec sheet
We send Nepali sample clips and the spec sheet in reply.
You get Nepali clips and the spec sheet
-
03
Licence and quote
We agree the licence terms and send a quote for the order.
You get Written licence terms and a quote
-
04
Delivery
The licensed Nepali speech is delivered to you.
You get Licensed Nepali speech with transcripts
-
05
Fill the gaps
Accents, devices or domains that are missing get recorded to your brief.
You get New Nepali speech, recorded to your brief
Get Nepali sample clips Start with the sample clips, then decide.
Nepali speech data terms
The words that come up when you buy or build Nepali speech data. The full glossary covers every data type.
- Devanagari
- The script Nepali and Hindi are written in, left to right.
- Honorific
- A word form that shows respect. Nepali has several levels of you.
- Code-mixing
- Switching between languages inside one sentence, such as Nepali with English words.
- Speaker metadata
- Details recorded about each speaker, such as gender and age, that let you check the speaker mix against your users.
- OTS dataset
- Short for off-the-shelf dataset: data already collected and ready to license before a buyer asks for it, instead of recorded to one buyer's brief.
- Word error rate (WER)
- The share of words a speech model gets wrong against a reference transcript. Lower is better.
- Character error rate (CER)
- The same idea counted in characters, often used alongside WER, since small spelling differences can make WER look worse than the model is.
- Utterance
- One stretch of speech by one speaker, such as a single prompt read aloud or one turn in a conversation.
More Nepali and speech data
Every language in stock is on the off-the-shelf speech datasets page. Related speech datasets: Hindi.
OTS speech datasets
Around 35,000 hours across languages, ready to license.
Nepali data to your brief
Nepali speech, text and translation, collected to order.
Transcription
Nepali audio turned into timed text, checked by people.
Indian language data
Beyond Nepali, across the languages of India.
Data and model evaluation
Held-back Nepali speech scored against your targets.
Questions about the Nepali speech dataset
Straight answers about licensing Nepali speech. The off-the-shelf FAQ covers questions that apply to every language.
Do you have a Nepali speech dataset ready to license?
Yes. Roughly 500 hours of Nepali speech, prompts and conversations are already recorded and ready to license, as part of our off-the-shelf speech pool.
What's in the Nepali speech dataset?
A mix of scripted prompts and natural conversations in Nepali, recorded on mobile phones, laptops and studio microphones, in quiet and noisy settings. Every recording comes with a transcript and metadata about the speaker, the device and the setting, in WAV, OGG or another common format.
Does it include Nepali-English mixed speech?
Everyday Nepali often includes English words, so ask how much mixed speech is in the hours you'd license. The sample clips let you hear it before you commit.
Did every speaker consent to AI training?
Yes. Every speaker gave consent for their recordings to be used for commercial AI training.
How is the Nepali dataset licensed?
Licence terms are agreed with each customer, in writing, before delivery. That includes how you can use the data and whether anyone else can license the same recordings.
How much does the Nepali speech dataset cost?
We quote each order on its own, based on the hours you need and the licence terms. Send your request and your named contact comes back with a quote.
Can we hear Nepali samples first?
Yes. Ask and we send Nepali sample clips with the spec sheet, so you can check the audio before you commit.
What if we need more than 500 hours, or a specific accent?
We collect it. Nepali speakers from our network record new speech to your brief, such as a region, an age group, a device or a domain, and it can sit alongside the hours you license from stock.
Is this the same as a Nepali voice dataset or speech corpus?
For most uses, yes. Speech dataset, voice dataset, audio dataset and speech corpus are names for the same thing: recorded Nepali speech with details about each recording. If you need studio-quality voice for text-to-speech, ask for the recordings made in a studio.
Can we use it as a Nepali speech-to-text (ASR) dataset?
Yes. Every recording comes with a transcript, so it's ready for training and testing Nepali speech-to-text models. The spec sheet shows the transcript style, so you can check it matches your pipeline before you license it.
Why not use a free Nepali speech dataset?
Public Nepali corpora are a good start for research. Each one has its own licence and terms of use, and they cover what their creators chose to record, such as read sentences or broadcast speech. Read the licence before you train a commercial model on one, and check that it sounds like your users.
What does OTS mean?
OTS stands for off-the-shelf: data that's already recorded and ready to license, instead of collected after you order. Our OTS Nepali speech dataset is roughly 500 hours.
How many hours of Nepali speech do we need?
It depends on your starting model. A test set can be a few hours, fine-tuning a multilingual model often starts at tens to a few hundred hours, and training from scratch takes thousands. Your own tests should decide.
Can we fine-tune Whisper or wav2vec 2.0 on it?
Yes. Teams commonly fine-tune open speech models like these on licensed Nepali speech, and every recording comes with a transcript in WAV, OGG or another common format. The spec sheet shows the transcript style, so you can plan any conversion before you train.
Do you work with US teams?
Yes. We take calls in US Eastern mornings, which is evening in India. We're ISO 27001 certified, our SOC 2 report is available under NDA, and we sign GDPR data processing agreements and HIPAA business associate agreements on request.
Get Nepali sample clips
Say roughly how many Nepali hours you need and what the model is for. We'll send sample clips and the spec sheet.
- Your named contact replies within one business day.
- We send Nepali sample clips and the spec sheet.
- We agree the licence terms and send a quote.
This opens your email app with the request filled in. Nothing is sent until you press send. You can also use the contact page.