Blizzard Challenge 2007

For the Blizzard Challenge 2007, ATR-SLC ( http://www.slc.atr.jp/) will release a newly-recorded eight-hour American English speech database. Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated and each participant will synthesize them with their system. The synthesised speech will then be put on the web for evaluation.

The results will be presented at a satellite event at The ISCA 6th Speech Synthesis Workshop, in Bonn. Participants will be expected to submit 4 page papers describing their entries for review. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, and published on the Blizzard website.

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Registration

Interested parties should register their intentions to participate by mailing blizzard@festvox.org. They should identify a contact person in their team, and provide email and real mail addresses.

A registration fee of 500USD is due at time of submission (March 30) to offset the costs of paying undergraduate listeners. There is a mailing list for discussion and announcements for the challenge:

 blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

To join the list send a message to majordomo@festvox.org with the following line in the body of the message

 subscribe blizzard-discuss

Once you a member you will be able to mail messages to blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Timeline

Challenge

   Jan  23 2007  Blizzard Challenge 2007 Announcement
   Feb   2 2007  Participant registration deadline
   Feb  16 2007  Deadline for agreement for the use of the corpus
   Feb  23 2007  Database released
         (one month for training)
   Mar  23 2007  Test sentences released
         (one week for synthesis)
   Mar  30 2007  Deadline for the synthesized speech
         (two weeks for preparation of the evaluation web site)
   Apr  16 2007  Evaluation system goes live
         (one month for evaluation)
   May  14 2007  End of Evaluation 
                 - but the listening test for volunteers will remain live
         (two weeks for gathering the scores)
   June 8 2007  Results distributed to teams [Revised date]

Papers and workshop

   June 29    2007  Satellite workshop papers due
   July 31    2007  Notification of acceptance / feedback to authors
   Aug  1-6   2007  Short period for paper revisions
   Aug  6     2007  Final papers due
   Aug  22-24 2007  6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis in Bonn (SSW6)
   Aug  25    2007  Presentation of results at the satellite workshop in Bonn

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Workshop

This is a draft programme - it may change

System papers will be 15mins + up to 5mins questions each. The order of presentations was chosen randomly.

   09.30 Registration
   10.00 Opening address [Simon King, on behalf of the organising committee]
   10.05 Description of this year's listening test design; listeners' feedback [Mark Fraser]
   10.20 Description of the ATR database [Shinsuke Sakai?]
   10.40 4 system papers (iFLYTEK/USTC, UPC, Edinburgh, INESC-ID)
   12.00 Break
   12.10 3 system papers (Nokia, DFKI, Cereproc)
   13.10 Lunch
   14.40 Description of the statistical analysis [Rob Clark]
   15.10 4 system papers (UCD, CMU, Voiceware, HTS)
   16.30 Break
   16.40 3 system papers (IVO, Toshiba, SVOX)
   17.40 Closing address [Simon King]
         Open discussion [Moderator: Alan Black?]
   ~18.30 Close
   19.00 Informal evening event involving food and drink (at participants' own expense).

The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Rules

The rules for participation are available at Blizzard Challenge 2007 Rules

The Blizzard Challenge: Further Information

For further information please contact blizzard@festvox.org

Further description of the Challenge itself was published in Interspeech 2005 Eurospeech in Lisbon: http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/bc2005/IS051946.PDF

Results from previous Challenges:

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