Large Scale Evaluation of Corpus-based Synthesizers: Results and Lessons from the Blizzard Challenge 2005

The Blizzard Challenge 2005 was a large scale international evaluation of various corpus-based speech synthesis systems using common datasets. Six sites from around the world, both academic and industrial, participated in this evaluation, the first ever to compare voices built by different systems using the same data. Here we describe results of the evaluation and many of the observations and lessons discovered in carrying it out.