Usborne Publishing Ltd release of audiobook recordings for Blizzard 2017

These data were originally only available to registered participants in the Blizzard Challenge 2017. They are now available to everyone. The same data was also used in the 2018 challenge.

Speech data

This data is released under a license for non-commercial use only. Read and accept the license. 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.

Downloads

The following files are available to download from here:

blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip - full release of data for Blizzard 2017

md5 checksum for the file is as follows:

21c3f4ddcd724417632b96ef99deec20  blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip

and the sizes of the file is:

765M	blizzard_release_2017_v2.zip

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

Contact Simon King for more details.