Blizzard Challenge 2016

Google UK has generously provided financial support to the Blizzard Challenge 2016

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2016 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2016 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

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).

The speech + text data comes from professional audiobooks produced by Usborne Publishing.

At this time, only the pilot data are available, so you can make a start with that. Complete the license for the pilot data, which can be accessed via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2015/usborne_blizzard2015

Data download

• Pilot data from 2015
  • about 2 hours of British English speech data in from a single female talker
  • A sentence-level alignment between text and speech is provided by Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory.
  • Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2015/usborne_blizzard2015

• Full data
  • Will be the pilot data, plus additional data from the same speaker.
  • Coming soon...

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. (Coming later...)

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 22    2016  -  databases to be released
  Apr 18    2016  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 22    2016  -  participants submit synthetic speech (by midnight UTC)
  May       2016  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jun       2016  -  end of evaluation period
  Jul       2016  -  release of results 
  Aug  5    2016  -  deadline to submit workshop papers
  Aug 12    2016  -  notification of acceptance
  Sep  8-12 2016  -  Interspeech 2016, San Franscisco, USA
  Sep 13-15 2016  -  SSW9, Sunnyvale, California, USA
  Sep 16    2016  -  Blizzard Challenge workshop, somewhere near SSW9

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 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