Blizzard Challenge 2014

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2014 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2014 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge if you actually plan to submit an entry to the challenge

Registration and license agreement

1. 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. Please state which datasets you want to download and which tasks you are planning to submit entries to (this is non-binding, but is helpful for our planning).

2. Complete the license for Indian language data, which can be accessed via http://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2014/

Data download

• Indian languages: About 2 hours of speech data in each of six Indian languages (Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil and Telugu), recorded by native professional speakers in high quality studio environments. Text is provided in UTF-8 format. No other information, such as segment labels, is provided.

• These speech databases are provided by the group of institutions: IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Madras, DAIICT, SSN College of Engineering, IIT Mandi, IIT Guwahati with support and collaboration from DeitY, Gov. of India.

• You will be sent a username and password to download the data after accepting the license. Download links can be found via http://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2014/
• Note that the official release for this challenge is only the speech data (wav/ directory), sampled at 16 kHz, and the corresponding text in UTF-8 format (train.done.data).

• Development tools, available via : http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/, 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://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2014/Blizzard2014_Ques.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 15    2014  -  databases to be released
  Apr 15    2014  -  test sentences released to participants
  Apr 21    2014  -  participants submit synthetic speech
  May       2014  -  evaluation systems go live
  Jun 30    2014  -  end of evaluation period
  Aug  9    2014  -  deadline to submit workshop papers
  Aug 15    2014  -  notification of acceptance
  Sep 14-18 2014  -  Interspeech 2014, Singapore
  Sep 19    2014  -  Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop, Singapore

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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