Blizzard Challenge 2020

Read these first

• First, please read the Call for Participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2020 in PDF format
• Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2020 Rules before participating
• You should only register for the challenge if you actually intend to submit an entry to the challenge and to comply with all the rules.

The organising committee this year is led by Zhenhua Ling from USTC with assistance from The University of Edinburgh.

Registration

Register by emailing blizzard@festvox.org. We need to know your

• preferred team name - the organisers may adjust this so that all teams have meaningful, unique names
• affiliation - the name of your University and lab, or your Company
• the name of the main contact person - this must be exactly one person who is responsible for all communication with the organiser
• contact details:
  • main contact person's email address - should be an institutional email address
  • backup email address(es)
  • postal address
  • phone number

Data download

Complete the licence and download the data - only available to registered participants in the challenge, so please wait for your registration to be accepted before completing the license.

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

• A questionnaire is included with the test materials. Please complete and include it within your submission.

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 supersedes 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!

The dates of Interspeech are final and correct. The workshop date is currently provisional.

  Feb 10    2020 - challenge announcement and registration open
  Feb 20    2020 - database released
  Mar 26    2020 - team registration closes
  May 04    2020 - test sentences released to participants
  May 14    2020 - deadline for participants to submit synthetic speech (23:59 AoE)
  May 18    2020 - last date for payment of the entry fee
  Jun       2020 - evaluation systems go live
  Aug 02    2020 - end of the evaluation period
  Aug 14    2020 - release of results
  Aug 24    2020 - deadline to submit workshop papers (midnight AoE)
  Aug 31    2020 - notification of acceptance
  Oct 25-29 2020 - Interspeech 2020, Shanghai, China
  Oct 30    2020 - Joint Workshop for the Blizzard Challenge
                   and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020
                   at Shanghai International Studies University,
                   550 Dalian Road (W), Shanghai 200083, China

Workshop

Information on the workshop will appear here in due course: Blizzard Challenge 2020 Workshop

Any questions?

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

Previous challenges

• Blizzard Challenge 2019
• Blizzard Challenge 2018
• Blizzard Challenge 2017
• 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