Blizzard Challenge 2018

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2018 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2018 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 in from a single female talker
• to encourage wider participation in the challenge, we will provide participating teams with the following items, for optional use:
  • cleaned-up text
  • a sentence-level alignment between text and speech
  • segmented waveforms, extracted linguistic and acoustic features, and a complete benchmark DNN-based system built from them [under construction - coming soon!]
• download links, for registered participants, can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2018/usborne_blizzard2018 [link will be added on 1st February 2018]

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
• you may wish to informally compare your output to the synthetic speech samples submitted for the 2016 Blizzard Challenge (which used a subset of the data being used this year) when deciding whether your system is worth submitting.

Questionnaire

• Download the questionnaire, complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2018/system_questionnaire.txt (will be provided 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  1    2018  -  database released
  Apr 18    2018  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 26    2018  -  participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (by midnight UTC)
  May       2018  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jun       2018  -  end of evaluation period
  Jul  1    2018  -  release of results 
  Jul 13    2018  -  deadline to submit workshop papers
  Jul 30    2018  -  notification of acceptance
 Sep 1 or 8 2018  -  Blizzard Challenge workshop, Microsoft India, Hyderabad (date still TBC)
  Sep  2-6  2018  -  Interspeech 2016, Hyderabad, India

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2018 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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