Blizzard Challenge 2012

Data for the Blizzard Challenge 2012 was generously provided by Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Cambridge Research Laboratory http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/crl/index.html

Read these first

This challenge is organised in two phases. Phase 1 was a preliminary phase run during 2011. Phase 2 is the main phase and is about to start. You may still register for Phase 2, even if you didn't participate in Phase 1.

• Phase 1
  • This is now completed.
  • You can still read the Call for Participation in Phase One of the Blizzard Challenge 2012 in PDF format.
• Phase 2
  • First, please read the Call for Participation in Phase Two of the Blizzard Challenge 2012 in PDF format.
  • Then read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2012 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge and download the data if you plan to submit an entry to the challenge in 2012.

Data download and license agreements

1. 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.
2. License: complete the license agreement for the data, which can be accessed via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/
3. Download: You will be sent a username and password to download the data. Download links can be found on the above page.

• Development tools, available via : http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/, include:
  • Submitted synthetic speech and listener scores for some previous Blizzard Challenges, which may be helpful during development
  • Specific development data for the 2012 tasks.

• Questionnaire:
  • Download the questionnaire, complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the Timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2012/system_questionnaire.txt (not yet available)

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!

  Feb  25 2011 Start of Phase One. Databases released
  Aug 28-31 2011 Interspeech 2011, Florence, Italy
  Sep 2 Blizzard 2011 workshop, Italy
  Dec 4 2012 Call for participation in Phase Two and release of development set
  Feb 2012 - evaluators (EH2.2) submit the test sentences that they want to be synthesised
  Feb 2012 - test sentences released to participants in the synthesis task (EH2.1)
  Mar 2012 - participants in EH2.1 submit synthetic speech
  Mar 2012 - synthetic speech distributed to participants in EH2.2
  Apr 2012 - main evaluation system goes live (standard MOS, SIM, WER tests)
  Jun 2012 - end of evaluation period
  Jun 2012 - evaluators return their results (written up as workshop papers)
  Jul 2012 - participants in the synthesis task submit their workshop papers
  Sep 9-13 2012 Interspeech 2012, Portland, Oregon, USA
  Sep 14 2012 Blizzard 2012 workshop, Portland, Oregon, USA (date provisional)

Workshop

Information on the workshops will be made available nearer the time.

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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

Concurrent challenges

• Blizzard Challenge 2011