The Blizzard Challenge 2013 - Indian Language Tasks

The Blizzard challenge 2013 was the ninth annual Blizzard challenge which was organized by University of Edinburgh handling the English language tasks and IIIT Hyderabad handling the Indian language tasks. This paper decsribes the Indian language tasks in the Blizzard challenge 2013. The Indian language tasks consisted of data from four Indian languages : Hindi, Bengali, Kannada and Tamil taken from the IIIT-H Indic database. Eight participants from across the world used the speech data provided as well as the corresponding text data in UTF-8, to build synthetic voices, which were then evaluated by means of listening tests.