Blizzard Challenge 2012

This year it's a little bit later, but it's amazing that Blizzard Challenge 2012 evaluation is now online.

This year it's going to be very interesting. The data to create the voices is taken from audiobooks, and one part of the test includes synthesis of paragraphs. That means that you can actually estimate how TTS built from a public data can perform.

The links to register are:

For speech experts:
http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/blizzard/blizzard2012/english/registerexperts.html

For other volunteers:
http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/blizzard/blizzard2012/english/registerweb.html

The challenge was created in order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data. 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.

Please distribute the second URL as widely as you can - to your colleagues, students, friends, other appropriate mailing lists, social networks, and so on.