Title: Large Scale Evaluation of Corpus-based Synthesizers: 
       The Blizzard Challenge 2005"
Speaker: Tina Bennett, LTI
Abstract:
  Because speech synthesis systems are often built using both different data
and techniques, it has been difficult to compare the impact of various
techniques.  In order to improve our understanding of their effects on the
quality of resulting synthesized speech, a large scale evaluation of systems
using common data was devised by Drs. Alan Black and Keiichi Tokuda.  The
Blizzard Challenge 2005 called upon current groups working in speech
synthesis around the world to build their best voices from the same
datasets.  This first-of-its-kind evaluation in speech synthesis was hosted
by CMU this past spring.  
  In this talk I will describe the organization and design of the Blizzard
Challenge and quickly describe the CMU team's submission.  The remainder of
the talk will focus on a discussion of results and lessons learned from
conducting an evaluation of this sort.
  A special session devoted to the Blizzard Challenge 2005 will be held at
this year's Interspeech conference in Lisbon, Portugal.