The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

Usborne Publishing Ltd release of audiobook recordings for Blizzard 2016

These data are currently ONLY available to registered participants in the Blizzard Challenge 2016. Do not complete this license form unless you are a participant.

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 for part of the data 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:
8998a753153d0ecb4e2f698cc21f561f blizzard_release_2016.zip
and the sizes of the files are:
614M	blizzard_release_2016.zip
If you experience difficulty downloading this large file, please contact blizzard@festvox.org for assistance.

Contact Simon King for more details.