Blizzard Challenge 2018
This Blizzard Challenge has finished
- Please do not try to register for this challenge - you are too late!
- However, the data are still available. Do not email us, but simply go to https://synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge#Tools_and_data
- The remainder of this page is left as a record of the Challenge
Read these first
- First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2018 in PDF format
- Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2018 Rules before participating
- You should only register for the challenge if you actually plan to submit an entry to the challenge
Registration
Register by emailing blizzard@festvox.org. We need to know your team name, the name of the main contact person, your affiliation, and contact details including email address, postal address and phone number.
Data download
The speech + text data comes from professional audiobooks produced by Usborne Publishing.
- about 6.5 hours of British English speech data in from a single female talker
- to encourage wider participation in the challenge, we will provide participating teams with the following items, for optional use:
- cleaned-up text
- a sentence-level alignment between text and speech
- segmented waveforms, extracted linguistic and acoustic features, and a complete benchmark DNN-based system built from them
- download links, for registered participants, can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2018/usborne_blizzard2018
Development tools
- available via : http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/, which include submitted synthetic speech and listener scores for some previous Blizzard Challenges, which may be helpful during development
- you may wish to informally compare your output to the synthetic speech samples submitted for the 2016 Blizzard Challenge (which used a subset of the data being used this year) and/or to the provided 2018 benchmark system when deciding whether your system is worth submitting.
Questionnaire
- A questionnaire is included with the test materials. Please complete and include it within your submission.
Mailing list
There is a mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge:
blizzard-discuss@festvox.org
Participants must join the list by sending a message to majordomo@festvox.org with the following line in the body of the message
subscribe blizzard-discuss
Once you are a member you will be able to mail messages to blizzard-discuss@festvox.org
Timeline
The timeline shown on this web page is the official one and supercedes those shown in announcements - it is subject to change, but we will try to follow it as closely as possible. Note that we will not consider any requests from participants to change the synthetic speech submission date or the paper submission date!
Feb 1 2018 - database released
Apr 18 2018 - test sentences released to participants
Apr 26 2018 - participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (by midnight UTC)
May 2018 - evaluation systems go live
Jun 15 2018 - end of evaluation period
Jul 1 2018 - release of results
Jul 13 2018 - deadline to submit workshop papers
Jul 30 2018 - notification of acceptance
[now expected by 4th August - delayed due to several late submissions]
Sep 2-6 2018 - Interspeech 2018, Hyderabad, India
Sep 8 2018 - Blizzard Challenge workshop, Microsoft India, Hyderabad
Workshop
Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2018 Workshop
Any questions?
- Please contact blizzard@festvox.org if you have any questions
Previous challenges
- Blizzard Challenge 2017
- Blizzard Challenge 2016
- Blizzard Challenge 2015
- Blizzard Challenge 2014
- Blizzard Challenge 2013
- Blizzard Challenge 2012
- Blizzard Challenge 2011
- Blizzard Challenge 2010
- Blizzard Challenge 2009
- Blizzard Challenge 2008
- Blizzard Challenge 2007
- Blizzard Challenge 2006 papers and results: http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2006.html
- Blizzard Challenge 2005 papers and results: http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2005.html
