Blizzard Challenge 2010

Read these first

• Download the Preliminary announcement and call for participation for the Blizzard Challenge 2010 in PDF format.

• Read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2010 Rules before participating.

Data download and license agreements

• First, you must register by emailing blizzard@festvox.org
• Then, complete license agreements for the data, which can be found here:
  • UK English databases:
    • Speech data and prompts for tasks EH1, ES1, ES2: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/phonetic_arts_blizzard2010/
    • Speech data and prompts for task EH2: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/roger_blizzard2010/
    • If you want time-aligned labels (including hand-corrected labels for Task EH2) for any of the English tasks, then you also need to complete the Unisyn lexicon license as explained on the above download pages.
  • Mandarin database (including labels):
    • Speech data, prompts and labels for tasks MH1, MH2, MS1 and MS2: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/chinese_blizzard2010/

• Data download: You will be sent a username and password to download the data. These are the same for all downloads, and will be activated for each download after you have returned the corresponding license agreement.
  • All databases: http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2010

• Development tools:
  • Submitted synthetic speech and listener scores are available for some previous Blizzard Challenges, which may be helpful during development: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/
  • Benchmark voices for the 2010 databases are under preparation using Festival and HTS; development sentences (the Blizzard 2009 test set) will be synthesised with these systems and made available shortly:
    • For task EH1: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/phonetic_arts_blizzard2010/
    • For task EH2: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/roger_blizzard2010/
    • For task MH1: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/chinese_blizzard2010/

• Questionnaire:
  • Download the questionnaire, complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the Timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2010/system_questionnaire.txt

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 a member you will be able to mail messages to blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

Timeline

The timeline shown on this web page is the offical 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!

TO DO

Workshop

Information on the workshop will be available later.

Any questions?

• Please contact blizzard@festvox.org if you have any questions

Previous challenges

• 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