Projects
NepSwor works across the regional languages of Nepal's plains and hills. YetiVoices works with Himalayan and Buddhist heritage languages. Both follow the same community-first pipeline, from consent to a working model.
Programmes
Regional languages of Nepal · 9 languages
Parallel sentence corpora, read and spontaneous speech, and shared benchmarks for speech recognition and translation across the major languages of the Terai and the mid-hills.
Himalayan heritage languages · 7 languages
Documentation of high-altitude and Buddhist heritage languages: structured corpora alongside ritual recitation, song and oral history, archived with the monasteries and communities that hold them.
Methodology
We begin with the speech community: mother-tongue organisations, elders and local schools agree what may be recorded, who owns it and how it may be used. Nothing enters a dataset without a signed community licence.
Each language is scored on written resources, institutional support, digital presence and existing corpora, producing a preparedness index that tells us whether to start with an alphabet, a wordlist or a full speech corpus.
Native writers build balanced prompt sets covering everyday speech, numerals, place names, agriculture, ritual vocabulary and code-switching, so the corpus is phonetically and topically representative.
Speakers of different ages, genders and dialect areas record in their own villages on calibrated equipment, with a supervisor checking noise floor, clipping and speaker metadata on the spot.
Every clip is transcribed in the community's chosen script, then reviewed by a second native validator. Disagreements go to a dialect panel rather than being silently overwritten.
Validated audio and parallel text feed speech recognition, text-to-speech and translation baselines, published with held-out test splits so improvements are measurable.
Learning material, dictionaries, word cards and working voice tools go back to the speakers, alongside archival copies held to FAIR standards.
If your community keeps a language that is not yet in NepSwor or YetiVoices, we can start with a readiness audit and a small pilot recording.
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