Blizzard Challenge 2008
My inbox this morning contained a message regarding another year for the Blizzard Challenge, which is a competition to help with the understanding and comparison of research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers. The challenge is an awesome idea in that it helps continue research and development in speech synthesis techniques -- something the world dearly needs. I also have sincere respect and appreciation for Alan Black, who is heavily involved in the challenge and is one of the world's leaders in speech synthesis research (he is *the* leader in my mind).
I participated as a test subject in the first challenge, and have been loosely monitoring the subsequent challenges. I remembered I didn't look at last year's challenge, so I took a look at it today. All neat stuff. Of particular interest to me was Marc Shroeder's paper on Mary TTS, which uses parts of FreeTTS. In a past life, I created/led FreeTTS, which we never really had the time to take as far as we had wanted. So, it was really great to see some of the work help with other people's research. Thanks Marc!
