The Blizzard Challenge 2013

The Blizzard Challenge 2013 was the ninth annual Blizzard Challenge which was once again organised by the University of Edinburgh with advice from the other members of the Blizzard Challenge committee – Prof. Keiichi Tokuda and Prof. Alan Black – joined this year by Dr. Kishore Prahallad who organised the Indian languages tasks. This summary paper only covers the English tasks; a separate paper is available which summarises those Indian language tasks. For the English tasks, a large single-speaker English corpus was used, comprising around 300 hours of audio from professionally-produced audiobooks.