Blizzard Challenge 2014
This Blizzard Challenge has finished
- Please do not try to register for this challenge - you are too late!
- The data are no longer available via this site
- However, related data may be available from https://www.iitm.ac.in/donlab/tts/index.php
- 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 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, and 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 21 2014 - test sentences released to participants Apr 28 2014 - participants submit synthetic speech (by midnight PDT) 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
