Blizzard Challenge 2023

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2023 in PDF format.
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2023 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge if you actually intend to submit an entry to the challenge and to comply with all the rules.

The organising committee this year is led by Olivier Perrotin from GIPSA-lab at University Grenoble Alpes, with assistance from The University of Edinburgh.

Registration

Register by emailing blizzard-challenge-organisers@googlegroups.com (note: this is a new address and differs from previous years). We need to know your:

• preferred team name - the organisers may adjust this so that all teams have meaningful, unique names
• affiliation - the name of your University and lab, or your Company
• the name of the main contact person - this must be exactly one person who is responsible for all communication with the organiser
• contact details:
  • main contact person's email address - should be an institutional email address
  • backup email address(es)
  • postal address
  • phone number

Data download

Corpus

Training data with its full description is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/7293056#.Y5C7YC3pNdt ‎
For a one-shot download, you can do in a terminal:

 pip3 install zenodo_get
 zenodo_get 10.5281/zenodo.7520564 -o ~/mylocalrepository -e

The -e option prevents the download to stop if there is an error in one file. If this happens, re-launch the command (only the not downloaded files will be downloaded). Full doc here.

Test data will be released on March 27th to registered participants.

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 Google Group for discussion and announcements for the challenge:

 https://groups.google.com/g/blizzard-challenge-discuss/

Participants must join this group in order to receive information about the Challenge. You need to log in to a Google account, then request to join. If you do not have a Google account, you will need to create one.

Timeline

The timeline shown on this web page is VERY preliminary and subject to change.

  Jan 13    2023 - challenge announcement and registration open
  Jan 13    2023 - database released
  Mar 05    2023 - team registration closes
  Mar 27    2023 - test sentences released to participants
  Apr 03    2023 - deadline for participants to submit synthetic speech (23:59 AoE)
  Apr 07    2023 - last date for payment of the entry fee
  Apr 17    2023 - evaluation systems go live
  Jun 04    2023 - end of the evaluation period
  Jun 16    2023 - release of results
  Jul 03    2023 - deadline to submit workshop papers (23:59 AoE)
  Jul 28    2023 - notification of acceptance
  Aug 20-24 2023 - INTERSPEECH 2023, Dublin, Ireland
  Aug 26-28 2023 - SSW12, Grenoble, France 
  Aug 29    2023 - Blizzard Challenge 2023 Workshop, same location as SSW

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2023 Workshop

Any questions?

Please contact blizzard-challenge-organisers@googlegroups.com if you have any questions.

Previous challenges

• Blizzard Challenge 2021
• Blizzard Challenge 2020
• Blizzard Challenge 2019
• 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