The Blizzard Challenge 2007

In Blizzard 2007, the third Blizzard Challenge, participants were asked to build voices from a dataset, a defined subset and, following certain constraints, a subset of their choice. A set of test sentences was then released to be synthesised. An online evaluation of the submitted synthesised sentences focused on naturalness and intelligibility, and added new sections for degree of similarity to the original speaker, and similarity in terms of naturalness of pairs of sentences from different systems. We summarise this year’s Blizzard Challenge and look ahead to possible designs for Blizzard 2008 in the light of participant and listener feedback.