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**Apologies for cross posting**
Dear colleagues,
We are delighted to announce the 2025 edition of the Blizzard Challenge, which will be co-located with the Speech Synthesis Workshop 2025 (SSW13).
The theme of this edition of SSW is "Scaling down: sustainable synthesis for language diversity". In line with this theme, the challenge focuses on synthesizing speech for Bildts, a unique language variety from the Netherlands.
The information about the challenge is available (and will be updated) here:
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/ssw13-2025/the-blizzard-challenge-2025/
About Bildts
Bildts (Indo-European > West Germanic) is spoken in Het Bildt, a region in the Dutch province of Friesland. With approximately 10,000 first and second language speakers, it represents a vibrant example of European linguistic diversity. The language variety
has been systematically through grammatical descriptions, dictionaries with pronunciation information, literary works, media productions (weekly radio broadcasts, theater performances), and regular newspaper columns.
For the Blizzard Challenge 2025, we have curated a dataset of high-quality audio recordings with corresponding linguistic resources. This choice of Bildts aligns with our theme of "sustainable synthesis for language diversity" - it presents participants with
the real-world challenge of developing synthesis capabilities for a well-documented but data-limited language variety, representative of the thousands of smaller languages that could benefit from speech technology. The challenge is composed of two tasks:
Data download
The training data is available here:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14792457
A pronunciation dictionary for Bildts will be made available to participants in February 2025. This will include phonetic transcriptions that can be used for training text-to-speech systems. Participants will be notified when this resource becomes available.
Timeline
This is a preliminary timeline and is subject to change.
Any questions?
Please contact blizzard-challenge-organisers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx if you have any questions.
Please feel free to distribute this announcement.
The Blizzard Challenge 2025 Organising team |