Blizzard Challenge 2015

DeitY: Gov. of India, Apple Inc., and Google Inc., have generously provided financial support to the Blizzard Challenge 2015.

http://deity.gov.in/

Google UK has generously provided financial support to the Blizzard Challenge 2015

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2015 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2015 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge if you actually plan to submit an entry to the challenge

Registration and license agreement

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. Please state which datasets you want to download and which tasks you are planning to submit entries to (this is non-binding, but is helpful for our planning).

2. Complete the license for Indian language data, which can be accessed via http://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2015/

3. Optionally, complete the license for the English pilot data, which can be accessed via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2015/usborne_blizzard2015

Data download

Indian Languages

• About 4 hours of speech data is available in each of three Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil and Telugu), and about 2 hours of speech data in each of other three Indian languages (Marathi, Bengali and Malayalam), all recorded by native professional speakers in high quality studio environments. Text is provided in UTF-8 format. No other information, such as segment labels, is provided.

• These speech databases are provided by the group of institutions: IIT-Madras, IIIT-Hyderabad, SSNCE, CDAC Trivandrum, CDAC Mumbai, CDAC Kolkata.

• You will be sent a username and password to download the data after accepting the license. Download links can be found via http://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2015

• Note that the official release for this challenge is only the speech data (wav/ directory), sampled at 16 kHz, and the corresponding text in UTF-8 format (train.done.data).

English (pilot task)

• About 2 hours of British English speech data in from a single female talker will be released by approx. 23rd February 2015. This is a subset of a larger dataset that will be used as the main task in the Blizzard Challenges 2016 and 2017.

• The speech comes from professional audiobooks produced by Usborne Publishing.

• A sentence-level alignment between text and speech is provided by Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory.

• You will be sent a username and password to download the data after accepting the license. Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2015/usborne_blizzard2015

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

Questionnaire

• Download the questionnaire (for the main IL tasks only), complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the Timeline. Questionnaire

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       2015  -  databases to be released
  Apr 21    2015  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 30    2015  -  participants submit synthetic speech (by midnight PDT)
  May       2015  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jun 30    2015  -  end of evaluation period
  Jul 15    2015  -  release of results 
  Aug  1    2015  -  deadline to submit workshop papers
  Aug 7     2015  -  notification of acceptance
  Sep 6     2015  -  Interspeech 2015, Dresden, Germany
  Sep 11     2015 - Blizzard Challenge workshop, Berlin, Germany (TBC)

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2015 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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