Blizzard Challenge 2016
This Blizzard Challenge has finished
- Please do not try to register for this challenge - you are too late!
- However, the data are still available. We recommend using the 2018 data, which is a superset of the 2017 and 2016 data. Do not email us, but simply go to https://synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge#Tools_and_data
- 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 2016 in PDF format
- Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2016 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 5 hours of British English speech data in from a single female talker
- A sentence-level alignment between text and speech for some of the data is provided by Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory.
- Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2016/usborne_blizzard2016
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
- Download the questionnaire, complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2016/system_questionnaire.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 22 2016 - database released Apr 18 2016 - test sentences released to participants Apr 26 2016 - participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (by midnight UTC) May 2016 - evaluation systems go live Jun 2016 - end of evaluation period Jul 2016 - release of results Aug 5 2016 - deadline to submit workshop papers Aug 15 2016 - notification of acceptance Sep 8-12 2016 - Interspeech 2016, San Franscisco, USA Sep 13-15 2016 - SSW9, Sunnyvale, California, USA Sep 16 2016 - Blizzard Challenge workshop, somewhere near SSW9
Workshop
Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2016 Workshop
Any questions?
- Please contact blizzard@festvox.org if you have any questions
Previous challenges
- 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
