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The Blizzard Challenge 2007
Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases
http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/
Alan W Black, Keiichi Tokuda, Simon King,
Michael Picheny, and Shinsuke Sakai
January 23, 2007
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In order to better understand and compare research techniques in
building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, Blizzard
Challenge 2005 and 2006 were held. We will now have the third
challenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2007.
The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build
synthetic voices from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test
sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluated
through listening tests.
For the Blizzard Challenge 2007, ATR-SLC (http://www.slc.atr.jp/) will
release an eight-hour American English speech database. We would ask
each participant to build three voices using a) the whole set of the
database, b) the ARCTIC subset of the database, and c) a
limited-amount of sentences chosen by each participant, respectively.
Unknown sentences from an independent source will be generated and
each participant will synthesize them with their system. The speech
will then be put on the web for evaluation.
The results will be presented at a satellite event at ISCA Speech
Synthesis Workshop, in Bonn, Germany. 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.
Call for participation: http://festvox.org/blizzard/
The Blizzard Challenge: Registration
Interested parties should register their intentions to participate by
mailing blizzard@festvox.org. They should identify a contact person
in their team, as well as 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:
To join the list send a message to majordomo@festvox.org with the
following line in the body of the message
subscribe blizzard-discuss
The Blizzard Challenge 2007: Timeline
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
(two weeks for gathering the scores)
May 28 2007 Results distributed to teams
(one month for writing paper)
June 29 2007 Satellite workshop papers due
(two weeks for review)
July 16 2007 Notification of acceptance
Aug 22-24 2007 6th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis in Bonn
Aug 25 2007 Presentation of results at the satellite
workshop in Bonn
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
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