Blizzard Challenge 2017

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2017 in PDF format.
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2017 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge if you actually plan to submit an entry to the challenge

Registration

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.

Data download

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

• About 6.5 hours of British English speech data from a single female talker, which comprises 5 hours of speech already released for the 2016 challenge plus the audio from 6 additional books that were used for test material in 2016.
• Processed versions, such as alignments, are shared via the Blizzard Challenge 2016-7 Git Repository
• Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2017/usborne_blizzard2017

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, complete it, and return it at the same time as your synthetic speech: http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2017/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 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!

  Dec  8    2016  -  database released
  Mar       2017  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr       2017  -  participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (by midnight UTC)
  Apr       2017  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jun       2017  -  end of evaluation period
  Jul  3    2017  -  release of results 
  Jul 17    2017  -  deadline to submit workshop papers
  Jul 31    2017  -  notification of acceptance
  Aug 20-24 2017  -  Interspeech 2017, Stockholm, Sweden
  Aug 25    2017  -  Blizzard Challenge workshop, Stockholm (date and location provisional)
  Aug 28-   2017  -  EUSIPCO 2017, Kos, Greece

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2017 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• Blizzard Challenge 2016
• 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