Blizzard Challenge 2016

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

This Blizzard Challenge has finished

• Please do not try to register for this challenge - you are too late!
• However, the data are still available. We recommend using the 2018 data, which is a superset of the 2017 and 2016 data. Do not email us, but simply go to https://synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge#Tools_and_data
• The remainder of this page is left as a record of the Challenge

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

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 5 hours of British English speech data in from a single female talker
• A sentence-level alignment between text and speech for some of the data is provided by Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory.
• Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2016/usborne_blizzard2016

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 by the deadline given in the timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2016/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!

  Feb 22    2016  -  database released
  Apr 18    2016  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 26    2016  -  participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (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 15    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 2016 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