Blizzard Challenge
In order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, the Blizzard Challenge has been devised. The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer are then evaluated through listening tests.
General information
Blizzard Challenge organisation describes how the challenge is organised, who runs it and tells you how you can get involved.
Blizzard Challenge Roadmap shows the full history and future plan for the challenge. The plan is updated annually and your input is very welcome.
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
The annual challenges
Tools and data
The tools for running your own Blizzard-style listening test and the submissions and listening test results from several previous Challenges are available for your own research. Please remember to acknowledge Blizzard whenever you publish work that makes use of these tools or data. The corpora used in a few of the previous Challenges are also available.