IndicVoices: Towards building an Inclusive Multilingual Speech Dataset
  for Indian Languages
Tahir Javed Janki Atul Nawale Eldho Ittan George Sakshi Joshi Kaushal Santosh Bhogale Deovrat Mehendale Ishvinder Virender Sethi Aparna Ananthanarayanan Hafsah Faquih Pratiti Palit Sneha Ravishankar Saranya Sukumaran Tripura Panchagnula Sunjay Murali Kunal Sharad Gandhi Ambujavalli R Manickam K M C Venkata Vaijayanthi Krishnan Srinivasa Raghavan Karunganni Pratyush Kumar Mitesh M Khapra
We present INDICVOICES, a dataset of natural and spontaneous speech
containing a total of 7348 hours of read (9%), extempore (74%) and
conversational (17%) audio from 16237 speakers covering 145 Indian districts
and 22 languages. Of these 7348 hours, 1639 hours have already been
transcribed, with a median of 73 hours per language. Through this paper, we
share our journey of capturing the cultural, linguistic and demographic
diversity of India to create a one-of-its-kind inclusive and representative
dataset. More specifically, we share an open-source blueprint for data
collection at scale comprising of standardised protocols, centralised tools, a
repository of engaging questions, prompts and conversation scenarios spanning
multiple domains and topics of interest, quality control mechanisms,
comprehensive transcription guidelines and transcription tools. We hope that
this open source blueprint will serve as a comprehensive starter kit for data
collection efforts in other multilingual regions of the world. Using
INDICVOICES, we build IndicASR, the first ASR model to support all the 22
languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India. All the
data, tools, guidelines, models and other materials developed as a part of this
work will be made publicly available