IIT Madras Speech Lab
IIT Madras speech group — academic Indian-language ASR research and AI4Bharat home.
IIT Madras speech group — academic Indian-language ASR research and AI4Bharat home.
Best for researchers and Indian-language product teams building on IIT Madras / AI4Bharat outputs. Pricing: free.
What it is
IIT Madras hosts AI4Bharat and one of India's largest academic speech-processing groups. The lab publishes Indian-language datasets, baselines, and Conformer models that are widely used downstream in both research and Indic-language products. For any Indian-language ASR project, IIT Madras / AI4Bharat is the canonical first stop. Best fit when the buyer is researchers and indian-language product teams building on iit madras / ai4bharat outputs. The honest caveat: academic outputs; production support is the integrator's responsibility. As with any open-weights release, the integrator owns hosting, scaling, and SLA — but the licensing cost is zero and the model can be fine-tuned on in-house audio.
Watch out for: Academic outputs; production support is the integrator's responsibility.
Install / use
asr.iitm.ac.in — dataset and model downloadsFeatures
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | None |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
IIT Madras Speech Lab vs Whipscribe
| Feature | IIT Madras Speech Lab | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Yes | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | — | 99 |
| Platforms | Linux | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to IIT Madras Speech Lab
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