Blizzard Challenge 2017
Read these first
This year, there are two distinct parts to the Blizzard Challenge. Teams may enter either one, or both. The first part of the challenge follows the standard approach of previous years, and comprises the single hub task (2017-EH1). The second part of the challenge is novel and is designed to be accessible to the wider machine learning community; it comprises two spoke tasks (2017-ES1 and 2017-ES2)
- First, please read the calls for participation:
- Before participating, please read and agree to the rules for whichever part(s) of the challenge you are interested in
- 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.
- 2017-EH1
- About 6.5 hours of British English speech data from a single female talker, which comprises 5 hours of speech already released for the 2016 challenge plus the audio from 6 additional books that were used for test material in 2016.
- Processed versions, such as alignments, are shared via the Blizzard Challenge 2016-7 Git Repository
- Download links can be found via http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2017/usborne_blizzard2017
- 2017-ES1 and 2017-ES2
- About 5 hours of British English speech data (waveforms) from a single female talker, as used in the 2016 challenge, along with linguistic features and speech features.
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 at the same time as your synthetic speech: http://data.cstr.ed.ac.uk/blizzard2017/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!
Dec 8 2016 - 2017-EH1 database released Jan ? 2016 - 2017-ES1 and 2017-ES2 database released Mar 2017 - test sentences released to participants Apr 2017 - participants submit synthetic speech and questionnaire (by midnight UTC) Apr 2017 - evaluation systems go live Jun 2017 - end of evaluation period Jun 15 2017 - release of results Jun 29 2017 - deadline to submit workshop papers (for either workshop) Jul 31 2017 - notification of acceptance Aug 20-24 2017 - Interspeech 2017, Stockholm, Sweden Aug 25 2017 - Blizzard Challenge workshop, Stockholm (date and location provisional) Aug 28- 2017 - EUSIPCO 2017, Kos, Greece
Workshop
Information on the two workshops can be found here:
Any questions?
- Please contact blizzard@festvox.org if you have any questions
Previous challenges
- Blizzard Challenge 2016
- 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
