The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

Usborne Publishing Ltd release of audiobook recordings for Blizzard 2015

These data were only available to registered participants in the Blizzard Challenge 2015. These data are included in the 2016 and 2017 data sets, and can not be licensed separately.

Speech data

This data is released under a license for non-commercial use only. Read and accept the license. Once we have received your registration and your license, we will email you a password. All requests are manually checked.

Information about the speaker

The speaker's name is Lesley Sims, who is a female native speaker of British English. The speech and text are owned and copyrighted by Usborne Publishing Ltd. who have generously provided them for use in the Blizzard Challenge.

Information about the labels

A sentence-level segmentation and alignment between the text and the speech was created by Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory and subsequently re-processed by the University of Edinburgh to create label files corresponding to the original audio recordings. All audio in the distributed files is exactly as provided by Usborne, with no editing or format changes.

Downloads

The following files are available to download from here: md5 checksums for the files are as follows: 
2836a5d7ebd6ebafabe8e9ec5e059cf4 Usborne_Blizzard_2015_pilot.zip
and the sizes of the files are: 
247M	Usborne_Blizzard_2015_pilot.zip

Contact Simon King for more details.