AISHELL-1
by Beijing Shell Shell Technology
178h Mandarin read-speech corpus — open Chinese ASR baseline.
TL;DR
178h Mandarin read-speech corpus — open Chinese ASR baseline.
Best for open Mandarin ASR benchmark — the LibriSpeech-equivalent for Chinese. Pricing: free.
Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
OpenSLR, HuggingFace
What it is
AISHELL-1 (OpenSLR-33) is 178h of read Mandarin from 400 speakers. The canonical open Mandarin ASR benchmark. License: Apache-2.0.
Best for: Open Mandarin ASR benchmark — the LibriSpeech-equivalent for Chinese.
Watch out for: Apache-2.0 · read prompts · 400 speakers · single language (Mandarin). Cite: Bu et al., O-COCOSDA 2017.
Watch out for: Apache-2.0 · read prompts · 400 speakers · single language (Mandarin). Cite: Bu et al., O-COCOSDA 2017.
Install / use
from datasets import load_dataset; ds = load_dataset('AISHELL/AISHELL-1')
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 1 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
AISHELL-1 vs Whipscribe
| Feature | AISHELL-1 | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | No | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 1 | 99 |
| Platforms | OpenSLR, HuggingFace | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to AISHELL-1
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.