The Blizzard Challenge 2008

In order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, the Blizzard Challenge has been devised.

The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluated through listening tests.

Blizzard Challenge 2008 is current under development, and details will be presented before the end of December 2007.

Results from previous Challenges:

For the Blizzard Challenge 2007, ATR-SLC ( http://www.slc.atr.jp/) release a newly-recorded eight-hour American English speech database. Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated and each participant will synthesize them with their system. The speech will then be put on the web for evaluation.

The results were be presented at a satellite event at The ISCA 6th Speech Synthesis Workshop, in Bonn. Participants will be expected to submit 4 page papers describing their entries for review. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, and published on the Blizzard website.

Call for participation: http://festvox.org/blizzard/

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Registration

Interested parties should register their intentions to participate by mailing blizzard@festvox.org. They should identify a contact person in their team, as well as provide email and real mail addresses.

A registration fee of 500USD is due at time of submission (March 30) to offset the costs of paying undergraduate listeners. There is a mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge:

  blizzard-discuss@festvox.org
To join the list send a message to majordomo@festvox.org with the following line in the body of the message
  subscribe blizzard-discuss
Once you a member you will be able to mail messages to blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Timeline
    Jan  23 2007  Blizzard Challenge 2007 Announcement
    Feb   2 2007  Participant registration deadline
    Feb  16 2007  Deadline for agreement for the use of the corpus
    Feb  23 2007  Database released
          (one month for training)
    Mar  23 2007  Test sentences released
          (one week for synthesis)
    Mar  30 2007  Deadline for the synthesized speech
          (two weeks for preparation of the evaluation web site)
    Apr  16 2007  Evaluation system goes live
          (one month for evaluation)
    May  14 2007  End of Evaluation
          (two weeks for gathering the scores)
    May  28 2007  Results distributed to teams
          (one month for writing paper)
    June 29 2007  Satellite workshop papers due
          (two weeks for review)
    July 16 2007  Notification of acceptance
    Aug  22-24 2007 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis in Bonn
    Aug 25 2007   Presentation of results at the satellite
                  workshop in Bonn

The Blizzard Challenge: Further Information

For further information please contact blizzard@festvox.org

Further description of the Challenge itself was published in Interspeech 2005 Eurospeech in Lisbon: http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/bc2005/IS051946.PDF