Usborne Publishing Ltd release of audiobook recordings for Blizzard 2018

These data were originally only available to registered participants in the Blizzard Challenge 2018. They are now available to everyone. Note - the data are identical to those used in the 2017 challenge, and in addition several working benchmark systems are also provided.

Speech data

This data is released under a license for non-commercial use only. Read and accept the license, which is the same as for the 2017 data release.

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 (also included in the 2016 release) 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.

You should also check the Git repository of participant-contributed material, as described in the Blizzard Challenge 2018 Rules

Downloads

The following files are available to download from here:

blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip - full release of data for Blizzard 2017 (which is what we are using again in 2018)
HTSbenchmark/HTS-demo_BLIZZARD2018-BENCHMARK-FLS.tar.bz2 - a complete benchmark system which participants are encouraged to compare their entry to (e.g., to decide whether to submit)

md5 checksum for the files are as follows:

21c3f4ddcd724417632b96ef99deec20  blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip
cc6bb1815cf4b5da7a599b3bb782b1b7  HTS-demo_BLIZZARD2018-BENCHMARK-FLS.tar.bz2

and the sizes of the files are:

765M	blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip
4.6G    HTS-demo_BLIZZARD2018-BENCHMARK-FLS.tar.bz2

If you experience difficulty downloading large files, please contact blizzard@festvox.org for assistance.

Person responsible for this page: Simon King