Buyer's guide · 2027

Best Indian language speech and text data providers for 2027

Vendors and open datasets for Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and other Indian languages: what each covers, and when to commission new data instead.

Updated 6 November 2026 · Indika AI editorial team

Disclosure: Indika AI publishes this guide and is one of the companies in it. Facts about other companies come from their own websites or published news, linked under each entry, as of 6 November 2026. Check the current details with each vendor before you decide.

Voice assistants, call-centre analytics and Indic LLMs all need data in the way Indians actually speak and write: code-mixed, accented and full of regional vocabulary. Web-scraped data covers this badly, so teams either buy ready-made datasets, start from open data such as IndicVoices, or commission new collection and transcription with native speakers.

We list Indika first because this is our guide; the rest follow no ranking. Language coverage below is what each company states on its own site.

How we compared

Languages and dialects: which Indian languages each one states, and in what form
Ready-made or custom: off-the-shelf datasets, open data, or new collection to your spec
Speaker realism: read speech versus spontaneous, conversational or call-centre audio
Review quality: native-speaker transcription review and how errors are fed back
Consent and records: speaker consent and the records you will need under the DPDP Act

Indian-language coverage each company or project states
Provider	Type	Indian languages stated
Indika AI	Custom collection, review, evaluation	Confirmed per project
Karya	Custom data, datasets	22 official languages (speech)
Shaip	Datasets plus custom	13 + Indian English, ~103K hours
DesiCrew	Language operations	22+ languages (Indian and global)
Appen	Datasets plus crowd	Includes Bengali, Marathi, Tamil
Defined.ai	Marketplace plus custom	Hindi, Tamil named
LXT	Custom collection	Not listed by language
FutureBeeAI	Datasets, collection tool	Not listed by language
AI4Bharat IndicVoices	Open dataset (CC BY 4.0)	22 scheduled languages
Bhashini	Government models and APIs	36 text, 23 voice (Mar 2026)

The vendors

1. Indika AI (that's us)

India · Best for: custom collection, transcription review and evaluation with native speakers and domain experts

Indika runs transcription, annotation and evaluation programs with an expert network that includes linguistics and translation specialists, and adds domain experts where the content is clinical, legal or financial. It has delivered captioning, moderation and localization QA across 14 languages for a streaming platform.

Indika holds ISO 27001 and ISO 9001, is SOC 2 Type II audited and GDPR compliant, works with 60K+ vetted annotators and experts, and serves 25+ enterprise clients across 10+ industry verticals.
Send your language list, volumes and dialect needs; we confirm coverage and run a no-cost pilot before you commit.

2. Karya

Bengaluru · non-profit · Best for: speech data collected from rural speakers across many districts

Karya is a non-profit that pays rural Indian workers for digital data work. It provides speech, transcription and translation data, evaluations and India-specific datasets and benchmarks, and states speech coverage across the 22 official Indian languages.

Signed an MoU with the IndiaAI Mission in May 2026.

Sources: Karya · IndiaAI Mission MoU (May 2026)

3. Shaip

Louisville, KY · office in Ahmedabad · Best for: buying ready-made Indian speech datasets

Shaip's catalogue lists speech datasets in 13 Indian languages plus Indian English, about 103,000 hours: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese and Hinglish. It also does custom collection.

Ubiquity announced an agreement to acquire Shaip in February 2026.

Sources: Shaip: Indian language datasets · Ubiquity: Shaip acquisition (Feb 2026)

4. DesiCrew

Chennai (IIT Madras Research Park) · Best for: language operations and annotation run from India

DesiCrew offers annotation, RLHF, evaluation and LLM language operations and states 22+ languages, Indian and global.

Its site lists ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.

Sources: DesiCrew

5. Appen

Sydney and Kirkland, WA · office in Hyderabad · Best for: off-the-shelf datasets across many languages, including Bengali, Marathi and Tamil

Founded in 1996, Appen runs a crowd-sourced data service covering collection, annotation and evaluation. It states 1M+ contributors and 235+ languages, and its About page lists SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

Check: Ask which work runs through the open crowd and which through managed teams, and how contributors are vetted for your task.

Sources: Appen: About · Appen: datasets

6. Defined.ai

Seattle, with offices in Lisbon, Porto and Tokyo · Best for: buying speech datasets from a marketplace

Formerly DefinedCrowd, Defined.ai runs a data marketplace plus collection and annotation services. It states 70+ languages for speech and names Hindi and Tamil datasets. Its About page lists ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001.

Sources: Defined.ai: About · Defined.ai: language datasets

7. LXT

Toronto · Best for: multilingual speech and text collection at very large scale

LXT collects and annotates speech, text and multimodal data and states 1,000+ language locales. It integrated the clickworker crowd in July 2025.

Check: Ask which Indian languages and dialects it can staff today, and in what volumes.

Sources: clickworker/LXT integration (Jul 2025)

8. FutureBeeAI

India · Best for: smaller off-the-shelf speech datasets and a collection tool

Founded in 2020, FutureBeeAI sells off-the-shelf datasets and its Yugo speech-collection software. It states 50+ languages and 2,000+ datasets.

Check: Ask for the Indian languages and hours available before you plan around it.

Sources: FutureBeeAI · IndiaAI: FutureBeeAI profile

Open data to start from

AI4Bharat IndicVoices (IIT Madras) covers all 22 scheduled languages, with 23.7K hours (11.2K transcribed) from 51K speakers in 400+ districts, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Source: AI4Bharat IndicVoices on Hugging Face.

Bhashini, the government's language mission, offers translation and speech models through APIs; in March 2026 it reported 36 text and 23 voice languages. Source: News On AIR: Bhashini (Mar 2026).

Open data is a strong base, but it rarely matches your domain, audio channel or speaker mix. Most teams fine-tune on open data and then commission a smaller custom set from their own users' conditions. Our article The Voice Gap explains why.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I get Hindi, Marathi or Bengali speech data?

Start with open data such as AI4Bharat IndicVoices, buy ready-made datasets from vendors like Shaip or Appen, or commission custom collection and transcription review from a vendor with native speakers, such as Indika or Karya.

Is open Indian speech data enough to train a production model?

Usually not on its own. Open datasets are mostly collected in different conditions from your product. Most teams add a custom set recorded in their own domain, channel and speaker mix.

What should I check before buying Indian language data?

Ask for the exact languages, dialects and hours, the share of spontaneous speech, how transcripts were reviewed, and the speaker consent records you will need under the DPDP Act.