[hts-users:00366] Blizzard Challenge 2006 listening test

["Heiga ZEN (Byung Ha CHUN)" <zen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'd like to forward a mail from Dr. Alan Black about listening test of the Blizzard Challenge 2006.
The Blizzard Challenge is an open evaluation of speech synthesis systems using common speech dataset.
This year 7 academic groups and 7 companies participated in the challenge.

If you're interested in participating in the listening test, please read the following message.
Results will be available at the workshop held in CMU this September.

Regards,

Heiga Zen (Byung Ha Chun)

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The Blizzard Challenge 2006:
Evaluating corpus-based speech synthesis on common databases
http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/

LISTENING TESTS:

In our continuing investigation into corpus-based speech synthesis
techniques we have devised a large experiment, a number of different
research laboratories throughout the world used the same speech
databases to build synthetic voices.

We have set up web-based listening tests that we would like to have as
many people take part in as possible.  One of the goals of the
exercise is not just to find out how the different systems compare
against each other but also to discover how many participants are
sufficient to give significant results.

These tests play various waveform files to the listener who then is
asked to score them on a 1-5 scale, or in some tests type in what they
hear.

The results will also be compared with more controlled subsets of
listeners, but in this part we wish to have real web users be the
participants.

To carry out the listening test please go to
    http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/blizzard2006/register-R.html
You will be asked to register, then listen to and evaluate a set of
sentences.  We find it takes around 30-60 minutes to complete all the
tests.  It is good if you can carry this out in a single session, but
you can take a break and return later, continuing from where you left off.

Sorry, but we do not give any fee to you for participating in the
experiment, just our thanks for helping the improvement of spoken
output.

thanks

Alan
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 Heiga ZEN     (in Japanese pronunciation)
 Byung Ha CHUN (in Korean pronunciation)

 Department of Computer Science and Engineering
 Nagoya Institute of Technology
 Gokiso-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya 466-8555 Japan

 http://kt-lab.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~zen
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