Blizzard Challenge 2019

Apple and DataBaker have generously provided financial support to the Blizzard Challenge 2019

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2019 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2019 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.

Anonymity

The organising committee this year is led by Zhizheng Wu, from jd.com with three assistant academics who are based at Trinity College Dublin, and The University of Edinburgh.

The submissions from teams will be received by one of the academic members of the organising committee, and only they will have access to the complete submission during the running of the challenge. Zhizheng Wu will only have access to the subset of each entry required for running the listening test.

The results will be published in anonymised form, using letters to identify each team. During the running of the challenge, the mapping between team names and letter identifiers will only be known to the academic members of the organising committee, who are based at Trinity College Dublin, and The University of Edinburgh.

Data download

Complete the licence and download the data - only available to registered participants in the challenge.

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

• A questionnaire is included with the test materials. Please complete and include it within your submission.

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 supersedes 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!

Dates of Interspeech, SSW and the workshop are final and correct for the 2019 challenge.

  Feb 11    2019  -  database released
  Apr 22    2019  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 30    2019  -  participants submit synthetic speech (midnight AoE)
  Jun       2019  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jul 19    2019  -  end of the evaluation period
  Jul 29    2019  -  release of results 
  Aug  9    2019  -  deadline to submit workshop papers (midnight AoE)
  Aug 16    2019  -  notification of acceptance
  Sep 15-19 2019  -  Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austria
  Sep 20-22 2019  -  SSW10, Vienna, Austria
  Sep 23    2019  -  Blizzard Challenge workshop, Vienna, Austria

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2019 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• Blizzard Challenge 2018
• Blizzard Challenge 2017
• 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