Announcing the Blizzard Challenge 2025
Pioneering Speech Synthesis for Bildts
We are excited to announce the Blizzard Challenge 2025, which will focus on speech synthesis for Bildts, a unique regional language shaped by Dutch and Frisian influences spoken in Fryslân.
This year’s challenge is part of the 13th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW13), hosted by the University of Groningen’s Faculty Campus Fryslân in Leeuwarden. The theme of SSW13, “Scaling down: sustainable synthesis for language diversity,” exemplifies our goal to develop speech technology for underrepresented languages.
Innovating Speech Synthesis Together
This year, the Blizzard Challenge does something new by integrating the Bildts-speaking community into the evaluation process. Their participation aligns the initiative with a real-world focus and fosters collaboration between tech R&D and local interests.
The challenge will conclude with a dedicated session on August 27, 2025, following the 13th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (August 24–26) in Leeuwarden, offering an opportunity to reflect on findings and celebrate the progress in sustainable synthesis.
Stay tuned—more information, including registration details and dataset access, will be shared soon. Meantime, see this website for more information with author instructions, dates and deadlines..
Feel free to share this announcement widely to support awareness and participation!
Workshop topics
Papers in all areas of speech synthesis technology are encouraged to be submitted, including but not limited to:
Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for synthesis
Text processing for speech synthesis (text normalization, syntactic and semantic analysis)
Segmental-level and/or concatenative synthesis
Signal processing/statistical model for synthesis
Speech synthesis paradigms and methods; articulatory synthesis, parametric synthesis etc.
Prosody modeling and generation
Expression, emotion and personality generation
Voice conversion and modification, morphing
Concept-to-speech conversion speech synthesis in dialog systems
Avatars and talking faces
Cross-lingual and multilingual aspects for synthesis
Applications of synthesis technologies to communication disorders
TTS for embedded devices and computational issues
Tools and data for speech synthesis
Quality assessment/evaluation metrics in synthesis
Singing synthesis
Synthesis of non-human vocalisations
End-to-end text-to-speech synthesis
Direct speech waveform modelling and generation
Speech synthesis using non-ideal data (‘found’, user-contributed, etc.)
Natural language generation for speech synthesis
Special topic: “Scaling down: sustainable synthesis for language diversity”