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Sujith Pulikodan, Abhayjeet Singh, Agneedh Basu, Lokesh Rady, Nihar Desai, Pavan Kumar J, Prajjwal Srivastav, Pranav D Bhat, Raghu Dharmaraju, Ritika Gupta, Sathvik Udupa, Saurabh Kumar, Sumit Sharma, Vaibhav Vishwakarma, Visruth Sanka, Dinesh Tewari, Harsh Dhand, Amrita Kamat, Sukhwinder Singh, Shikhar Vashishth, Partha Talukdar, Raj Acharya, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh
Project VAANI is an initiative to create an India-representative multi-modal dataset that comprehensively maps India's linguistic diversity, starting with 165 districts across the country in its first two phases. Speech data is collected through a carefully structured process that uses image-based prompts to encourage spontaneous responses. Images are captured through a separate process that encompasses a broad range of topics, gathered from both within and across districts. The collected data undergoes a rigorous multi-stage quality evaluation, including both automated and manual checks to ensure highest possible standards in audio quality and transcription accuracy. Following this thorough validation, we have open-sourced around 289K images, approximately 31,270 hours of audio recordings, and around 2,067 hours of transcribed speech, encompassing 112 languages from 165 districts from 31 States and Union territories. Notably, significant of these languages are being represented for the first time in a dataset of this scale, making the VAANI project a groundbreaking effort in preserving and promoting linguistic inclusivity. This data can be instrumental in building inclusive speech models for India, and in advancing research and development across speech, image, and multimodal applications.
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@article{pulikodan2026vaani,
title = {VAANI: Capturing the language landscape for an inclusive digital India},
author = {Sujith Pulikodan and Abhayjeet Singh and Agneedh Basu and Lokesh Rady and Nihar Desai and Pavan Kumar J and Prajjwal Srivastav and Pranav D Bhat and Raghu Dharmaraju and Ritika Gupta and Sathvik Udupa and Saurabh Kumar and Sumit Sharma and Vaibhav Vishwakarma and Visruth Sanka and Dinesh Tewari and Harsh Dhand and Amrita Kamat and Sukhwinder Singh and Shikhar Vashishth and Partha Talukdar and Raj Acharya and Prasanta Kumar Ghosh},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Project VAANI is an initiative to create an India-representative multi-modal dataset that comprehensively maps India's linguistic diversity, starting with 165 districts across the country in its first two phases. Speech data is collected through a carefully structured process that uses image-based prompts to encourage spontaneous responses. Images are captured through a separate process that encompasses a broad range of topics, gathered from both within and across districts. The collected data u},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28714},
keywords = {eess.AS},
eprint = {2603.28714},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}