Defined.ai is one of the longest-standing names in training data, a marketplace where teams buy, sell, and commission datasets, with particular depth in speech and language. If it's on your shortlist, it's there for a reason. But "training data marketplace" now covers several different things, and the right alternative depends less on the vendor and more on what you're actually buying: off-the-shelf speech data, scarce multimodal content with cleared rights, or data collected to order. Here's the landscape, organized that way.
What Defined.ai is known for
Credit where due: Defined.ai helped establish the marketplace model itself, the idea that training data could be browsed and bought rather than negotiated deal by deal. Its historical strength is speech and language, with datasets for recognition, synthesis, and conversational AI, plus commissioned collection. Teams tend to look at alternatives for one of three reasons: they need modalities beyond speech and text, they need exclusivity or specific rights terms, or they need scarce real-world content that no commissioning workflow can produce, footage and audio that already exists in the hands of creators and media companies.
Alternatives for licensed multimodal data
If the need is real-world video, audio, gameplay, or business data with documented training rights, the relevant category is licensed content marketplaces, which aggregate rights holders rather than commissioning collection. Troveo is built for exactly this: more than 7,000 licensors, 95 percent exclusive, across video, audio, gameplay, and business data, browsable in Troveo Lens. Protege runs licensed data partnerships for AI labs. Kled AI and Wirestock source creator content for AI training. The distinguishing question in this category is always the same: can the provider document rights per asset, the standard covered in our rights-cleared training data explainer.
Alternatives for speech and language data
If speech is the whole requirement, the established data collection companies compete most directly on Defined.ai's home turf. Appen has decades of speech and language data collection behind it. LXT builds speech and language datasets across languages and domains. These are services businesses more than marketplaces: strongest when you need data collected or annotated to a specification, in many languages, at volume.
Alternatives for labeling and human feedback
Worth separating clearly: if what you actually need is annotation, RLHF, or evaluation rather than the data itself, that's a different market with different leaders, covered in our Scale AI alternatives guide. Plenty of "training data provider" shortlists mix these categories, and the mixing is where procurement time goes to die.
The landscape
| Provider | Category | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Troveo | Licensed content marketplace | Rights-cleared video, audio, gameplay, business data |
| Protege | Licensed data partnerships | Lab data partnerships |
| Kled AI | Creator content licensing | Creator-sourced training content |
| Wirestock | Creator content marketplace | Creator media with AI licensing |
| Appen | Data collection services | Commissioned speech and language data at volume |
| LXT | Data collection services | Multilingual speech and language datasets |
| Surge AI and others | Labeling and RLHF | Annotation and human feedback, see our Scale AI guide |
How to choose
The evaluation is the same regardless of vendor, and we've covered it in depth in our guides to AI training data providers and how to buy AI training data. The short version: match the provider category to your actual need, verify per-asset rights documentation and explicit training-use licensing, ask about exclusivity, and sample in your own pipeline before signing. The category confusion is the expensive mistake; the rest is diligence.
Where Troveo fits
Troveo is the alternative when the requirement is scarce, real-world, rights-cleared content: video first, plus audio, gameplay, and business data, sourced from the people who own it and delivered training-ready with documentation per asset. It is a licensing marketplace rather than a collection service, which means the inventory is content that already exists in the world, the kind no commissioning workflow can recreate, from multi-camera shoots to continuous gameplay. Browse it in Troveo Lens, or contact us with your brief and we'll put samples in front of you.