Blizzard Challenge 2010

Read these first

• Download the Preliminary announcement and call for participation for the Blizzard Challenge 2010 in PDF format.

• Read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2010 Rules before participating.

Data download and license agreements

1. Register: by emailing blizzard@festvox.org
2. License: complete the license agreements for the data, which can all be accessed via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/
3. Download: You will be sent a username and password to download the data. These are the same for all downloads, and will be activated for each download after you have returned the corresponding license agreement. Download links can be found on the above pages.

• 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
  • Benchmark voices for the 2010 databases are under preparation using Festival and HTS; development sentences (the Blizzard 2009 test set) will be synthesised with these systems and made available

• Questionnaire:
  • Download the questionnaire, complete it, and return it by the deadline given in the Timeline. http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2010/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 a member you will be able to mail messages to blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

Timeline

The timeline shown on this web page is the offical 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  2 2010 Databases released?
  Mar  29 2010 Test sentences released
  Apr 9 2010 Deadline for submitting synthesized speech 
  Apr 19 2010 Evaluation system goes live
  Jun 11 2010 End of Evaluation
  Jun 25 2010 Deadline for returning the participant questionnaire
  Jun 25 2010 Results distributed to teams
  Jul 23 2010 Satellite workshop papers due
  Aug 13 2010 Notification of acceptance 
  Sep 22-24 2010 SSW7, Kyoto, Japan
  Sep 25 2010 Presentation of results at the satellite workshop in Kyoto, Japan
  Sep 6-10 2010 Interspeech 2010, Japan

Workshop

Information on the workshop will be available later.

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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