Blizzard 2007
in conjunction with the
Sixth ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis
Bonn, Germany / August 25, 2007

The Toshiba Entry for the 2007 Blizzard Challenge

Sabine Buchholz (1), Norbert Braunschweiler (1), Masahiro Morita (2), Gabe Webster (1)

(1) Speech Technology Group, Cambridge Research Lab, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd., Cambridge, UK
(2) Multimedia Lab, Toshiba Corporate Research and Development Center, Kawasaki, Japan

This paper describes the system with which we took part in the Blizzard Challenge for the first time. It describes how we created our own annotation from scratch and introduces the various system components, in particular the back-end. Results show that our system achieves excellent intelligibility, in particular with less data (e.g. the lowest word error rate for voice C 1), and reasonable naturalness (MOS of 3.0, 2.9 and 2.9 for voice A, B and C, respectively). They also reveal that our simple approach of randomly selecting sentences for voice C worked well.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Buchholz, Sabine / Braunschweiler, Norbert / Morita, Masahiro / Webster, Gabe (2007): "The Toshiba entry for the 2007 Blizzard Challenge", In BLZ3-2007, paper 014.