# IndicVoices: Towards building an Inclusive Multilingual Speech Dataset for Indian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Multilingual and code-switching ASR challenges for low resource Indian languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00235/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual ASR on 70 Languages: Tokenization, Architecture, and Generalization Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05756/) (2022)
- [Svarah: Evaluating English ASR Systems on Indian Accents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15760/) (2023)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition in Sanskrit: A New Speech Corpus and Modelling Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05852/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-driven Subword Grammar Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition in Tamil and Kannada](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13333/) (2022)
- [SPIRE-SIES: A Spontaneous Indian English Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00698/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05356/) (2024)
- [LAHAJA: A Robust Multi-accent Benchmark for Evaluating Hindi ASR Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11440/) (2024)
- [The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large-Scale, High-Quality, Culturally-Rich Speech Data for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20564/) (2025)
- [Empowering Low-Resource Language ASR via Large-Scale Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14026/) (2024)
- [Towards Building Large Scale Datasets and State-of-the-Art Automatic Speech Translation Systems for 14 Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04699/) (2024)
- [Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01691/) (2025)
- [LASER: An LLM-based ASR Scoring and Evaluation Rubric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07437/) (2025)
- [Towards Orthographically-Informed Evaluation of Speech Recognition Systems for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00941/) (2026)
- [CoSTA: Code-Switched Speech Translation using Aligned Speech-Text Interleaving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10993/) (2024)
- [RASMALAI: Resources for Adaptive Speech Modeling in Indian Languages with Accents and Intonations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18609/) (2025)
- [ASR Under the Stethoscope: Evaluating Biases in Clinical Speech Recognition across Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10967/) (2025)
- [IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19157/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Out-of-Vocabulary Performance of Indian TTS Systems for Practical Applications through Low-Effort Data Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13435/) (2024)
- [ELAICHI: Enhancing Low-resource TTS by Addressing Infrequent and Low-frequency Character Bigrams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17901/) (2024)
- [Phir Hera Fairy: An English Fairytaler is a Strong Faker of Fluent Speech in Low-Resource Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20693/) (2025)
- [Mark My Words: A Robust Multilingual Model for Punctuation in Text and Speech Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03793/) (2025)
- [NIRANTAR: Continual Learning with New Languages and Domains on Real-world Speech Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00534/) (2025)
- [SpeechT: Findings of the First Mentorship in Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12050/) (2025)
- [Are ASR foundation models generalized enough to capture features of regional dialects for low-resource languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23252/) (2025)
- [Efficient ASR for Low-Resource Languages: Leveraging Cross-Lingual Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07277/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Multi-Expert Projectors with Stabilized Routing for Multilingual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19451/) (2026)
- [CrossAccent-TTS: Cross-Lingual Accent-Intensity Controllable Text-to-Speech via Disentangled Speaker and Accent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25403/) (2026)
- [Indic DiarBench: A Multilingual Joint Diarization and ASR Benchmark for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23808/) (2026)
- [Seeds Before Objectives: Rethinking Evaluation for Low-Resource Garhwali ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10670/) (2026)
- [Sequential Adapter Stacking for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15758/) (2026)
- [Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Multilingual Multimodal Models for Low-resource ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13445/) (2024)
- [AMPS: ASR with Multimodal Paraphrase Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18368/) (2024)
- [HITSZ's End-To-End Speech Translation Systems Combining Sequence-to-Sequence Auto Speech Recognition Model and Indic Large Language Model for IWSLT 2025 in Indic Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19616/) (2025)
- [Voice of India: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Real-World Speech Recognition in India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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