Organizations: Independent Researcher · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · University of Florida · University of Minnesota - Twin Cities · IIT Roorkee
Sanskrit verse recitation is governed by Chandas, a strict prosodic framework defined by rhythmic Laghu (light) and Guru (heavy) syllables. Because existing Sanskrit speech datasets prioritize ASR or conversational TTS, they lack the metrical fidelity required for authentic verse synthesis. We introduce \textbf{ShlokaDhara}, a 43-hour, multi-speaker Sanskrit speech corpus capturing diverse meters, recitation styles, and melodic variations. We specifically focus on Text-to-Recite, a synthesis task explicitly requiring both prosodic accuracy and metrical correctness. Benchmarking state-of-the-art TTS architectures via an automated UTMOS (neural MOS) predictor demonstrates that XTTS-v2 achieves the highest perceptual quality. We further validate the XTTS-v2 generated samples using two paradigms: subjective assessments by 16 Sanskrit experts and novel empirical metrics, specifically, syllable-level Laghu-Guru duration analysis to objectively quantify structural metrical awareness. Ultimately, this work establishes a robust dataset and evaluation benchmark for prosody-aware computational Sanskrit recitation. Generated Samples: https://shlokadhara.vercel.app/
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Syllable-level Laghu (L, light) and Guru (G, heavy) annotation for the śloka Vidyā dadāti vinayaṃ, vinayād yāti pātratām (“Knowledge gives humility; from humility comes worthiness”).
Dataset
Language
Hrs
Speakers
Type
Vāksañcayaḥ
Sanskrit
78+
27
ASR
Kathbath
Multiple
191.8
Multiple
ASR
IndicVoices
Multiple
23K+
51K+
Conversational
Shrutilipi
Multiple
20
Multiple
Broadcast
Vedavani
Sanskrit
54
Limited
Vedic Chant
Rasa
Multiple
20/spk
44
Expressive TTS
Table 1: Comparison of existing Sanskrit and Indic datasets with ShlokaDhara .
Figure 2: ShlokaDhara Dataset Creation Pipeline
Metric
Value
Metric
Value
Duration (hours)
43.24
Avg. Duration (s)
8.5
Avg. Utterance Length
6.02 tokens
# Utterances
18,322
Avg. SNR (dB)
32.03
Spectral Centroid (Hz)
2185.3
Mean Pitch (Hz)
210.97
Pitch Std. Dev. (Hz)
42.22
Character Vocabulary
64
Word Vocabulary
18218
Table 2: Summary statistics of the ShlokaDhara dataset. All acoustic features are averaged over utterances.
Figure 3: Top sources other than Bhagavad Gita .
Figure 4: Semantic and acoustic PCA projections.
Figure 5: Average time-normalized F0 contours (Z-scores) of 13 speakers reciting Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 . Highlighting three distinct profiles (highly dynamic, moderate, flat/monotonic) against the remaining speakers demonstrates the dataset’s broad melodic diversity.
Model
Seen
Unseen
UTMOS ↑
CMOS ↑
UTMOS ↑
CMOS ↑
VITS
3.12
-0.0515
2.78
-0.0611
NaturalSpeech-V2
3.52
-0.0503
2.82
-0.0606
EnGenTTS
3.87
-0.0492
3.01
-0.0598
Parler-TTS
3.66
-0.0442
2.56
-0.0555
Voxtral
3.52
-0.0411
3.12
-0.0562
Table 3: Results of TTS models fine-tuned on the proposed ShlokaDhara dataset (UTMOS range is 0 to 6)
Figure 6: Evaluation of Text-to-Recite Task
Evaluation Criteria
Score (mean ± 95% CI )
Clarity and naturalness of speech
2.91{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}\pm 0.14}
Accuracy of pronunciation
3.01{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}\pm 0.14}
Correctness of Sandhi and word formation
3.14{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}\pm 0.14}
Preservation of rhythmic and metrical structure
2.92{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}\pm 0.14}
Overall quality of recitation
2.92{\color[rgb]{0,0,0}\pm 0.13}
Table 4: Human evaluation results for the proposed Text-to-Recite task. (CI=confidence interval)
Provides hyperparameters and setup for reproducibility.
Appendix
Table A.1: Table of Contents of the Appendix Section
Speaker
Hours ↓
Speaker
Hours ↓
spk012
3.42
spk011
2.41
spk014
3.35
spk017
2.38
spk002
3.31
spk004
2.32
spk015
3.10
spk001
2.20
spk007
2.93
spk013
1.95
spk003
2.66
spk006
1.52
Appendix
Table A.2: Speaker-wise duration contribution in hours for complete dataset, sorted in descending order.
Figure A.1: Speaker-wise distribution for Bhagavad Gita recited by 12 speakers, with some chapters from one speaker
Source
Hours ↓
Speakers
Chandas
Gita Chapter 2
3.29
13
Anushtup, Upajati, Indravajra, Upendravajra
Gita Chapter 18
3.11
11
Anushtup, Trishtubh
Gita Chapter 11
3.08
12
Anushtup, Upajati, Indravajra, Upendravajra
Vishnusahastranam
2.54
6
Anushtup, Shalini, Vanshastha, Indravajra
Gita Chapter 6
2.08
12
Anushtup
Gita Chapter 4
2.04
13
Anushtup
Appendix
Table A.3: Source-wise duration distribution (in hours), number of unique speakers, and associated chandas for each source.
Figure A.2: Laghu-Guru Duration Analysis Plot
ID
# Laghu
# Guru
Laghu (s)
Guru (s)
Ratio
1
13
19
0.232
0.401
1.72
2
12
20
0.321
0.358
1.12
3
18
16
0.201
0.399
1.98
4
18
16
0.172
0.321
1.87
5
32
16
0.289
0.395
1.37
6
16
8
0.272
0.370
1.36
Appendix
Table A.4: Verse-by-verse breakdown of syllable counts and empirical durations. ID: Sample ID, # Laghu / # Guru: Laghu/Guru Count, Laghu / Guru (s): Average Laghu/Guru Duration and Guru to Laghu Ratio. For averaging the count and duration, arithmetic mean has been used. For averaging the ratio (last column), geometric mean has been used.