Blizzard Challenge 2013

English data for the Blizzard Challenge 2013 were generously provided by The Voice Factory with the assistance of Lessac Technologies http://www.lessactech.com/

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2013 in PDF format
• Then read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2013 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 English data, which can be accessed via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/

Data download

• For English, you will be sent a username and password to download the data. Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/
• For Indian data please use the following four corpora from the IIIT-H INDIC corpus. Note that the official release for this challenge is only the speech data (wav/ directory) and the corresponding text in UTF-8 format (etc/txt.done.data.utf8). Any other information that may be included in the distributions, such as segment labels, phone set and Roman transliteration available from the sample Festvox voice builds is not officially provided or endorsed as a part of this challenge, although may be used by participants if they wish.

• • Hindi: http://festvox.org/databases/iiit_voices/iiit_hin_sukh.tar.gz
  • Bengali: http://festvox.org/databases/iiit_voices/iiit_ben_ant.tar.gz
  • Kannada: http://festvox.org/databases/iiit_voices/iiit_kan_lp.tar.gz
  • Tamil: http://festvox.org/databases/iiit_voices/iiit_tam_moh.tar.gz

• 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://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2013/system_questionnaire.txt (not yet available)

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 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!

  Jan 15 2013 - databases released
  Mar 25 2013 - IH test sentences released to participants
  Mar 31 2013 - participants submit synthetic speech for IH tasks
  Apr  1 2013 - EH test sentences released to participants
  Apr 10 2013 - participants submit synthetic speech for EH tasks
  Apr    2013 - evaluation systems go live
  Jun    2013 - end of evaluation period
  Jul    2013 - participants submit their workshop papers

  Aug 25-29 2013 Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France
  Aug 31 - Sep 2 2013 SSW8, Barcelona, Spain
  Sep  3 2013 Blizzard Challenge 2013 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain

Workshop

Information on the workshop can be found here: Blizzard Challenge 2013 Workshop (not yet available)

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• 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