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 will then be evaluated through listening tests.

Blizzard Challenge 2009 is current under development, and details will be presented before the end of December 2008.

Results from previous Challenges:

• Blizzard Challenge 2008 papers and results
• Blizzard Challenge 2007 papers and results
• Blizzard Challenge 2006 papers and results
• Blizzard Challenge 2005 papers and results

Call for participation: http://festvox.org/blizzard/

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:

  blizzard-discuss@festvox.org

  subscribe blizzard-discuss

    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

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