Blizzard Challenge Roadmap

From SynSIG

In recent years, the Blizzard Challenge changes task every 2 years, and each new task is introduced in pilot form for 1 year before it starts. Here's the picture so far, and the plan for the future (if any):

Year US English UK English Mandarin Indian languages Other
2005 ARCTIC
2006 ATR 5000 utterance male
2007 ATR 8 hour male
2008 Edinburgh 15 hour male ('Roger') Chinese Academy of Sciences 6.5 hour female
2009 Same as 2008 iFLYTEK 6000 utterance female ('WJ')
2010 Phonetic Arts 5 hour male ('rjs') + Edinburgh 1 hour ARCTIC male ('roger') Same as 2008 plus 2.5 hours extra
2011

EH1: Lessac 12000 utterance female ('Nancy')
ES1: as above, for address-reading domain
pilot: Librivox data from 2012

2012

EH2.1 Librivox XX hour male (John Greenman)
EH2.2 devise a method for evaluation

2013

2013-EH1: Lessac 300 hour female (Catherine 'Bobbie' Byers)
2013-EH2: 19 subset of the above

2013-IH1 pilot for 2014-IH1.x tasks (1 hour each of Hindi, Bengali, Kannada and Tamil)

2014

2014-IH1.1 (Assamese)
2014-IH1.2 (Gujarati)
2014-IH1.3 (Hindi)
2014-IH1.4 (Rajasthani)
2014-IH1.5 (Tamil)
2014-IH1.6 (Telugu)
2014-IH2.1-6 as above, but test sentences contain some English

2015

2015-EH1 pilot for 2016-EH1 (2 hours data)

2015-IH1.1 to 6 Hindi, Tamil and Telugu - 4 hours Marathi, Bengali and Malayalam - 2 hours 2015-IH2.1 to 6 as above, but test sentences contain some English

2016

2016-EH1 Usborne children's audiobooks 5 hour female (Lesley Sims)

2017 ?

2017-EH1 same as 2016-EH1 + X hours more data

2018
2019