The Blizzard Challenge 2011 Workshop, a satellite event of Interspeech 2011, is the culmination of the Blizzard Challenge: the largest, most wide-ranging and authoritative international speech synthesis evaluation campaign. Loquendo (News - Alert), a global speech technology provider that offers speech recognition and text to speech technology, has revealed the workshop will be held at its headquarters in Turin.

The goal of the challenge is to establish a unified text-to-speech testing platform, strengthen communication between speech technology institutions and stimulate speech technology research. The challenge aims at a better understanding and comparison of research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers, using the same speech database for all participants.

The seventh annual Blizzard Challenge is organized by SynSIG, the ISCA Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group that aims to promote the study of speech synthesis.

During the workshop, the challenge is to build one or two synthetic voices using the speech database provided, and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences, which are then evaluated through extensive listening tests. The goal for 2011 is to create two American English voices, one for general-purpose use and the other designed to read names and addresses.

According to SynSIG, the evaluation process for choosing the winners will be difficult. Assessing speech synthesis is not as easy as assessing speech recognition. It systematically requires subjective tests by human listeners, which makes assessment a difficult task, and assessing the overall quality of a TTS system does not often provide interesting information on how to improve the system, since the output is the result of several complex and intermixed processes.

The workshop will reveal the results from listening tests and allow participants to describe their TTS systems in detail.

Awarded Speech Industry ‘Market Leader’ for the past five consecutive years, Loquendo provides a complete range of speech technologies for telephony, mobile, automotive, embedded and desktop solutions in 32 languages with 76 voices, and is constantly growing.

“Loquendo is honored to host the 7th Blizzard Challenge Workshop, the most prestigious event in the calendar facilitating an exchange of ideas among those conducting research into speech synthesis,” said Paolo Coppo (News - Alert), vice president of Marketing & Business Development at Loquendo in a statement. “The workshop is a unique opportunity to compare different state-of-the-art TTS technologies with a view to discovering innovative solutions aimed at improving the quality and accuracy of text to speech. It will also be an occasion to meet eminent scientists, researchers, developers and key players in the field to discuss future trends in speech synthesis.”