Measuring a decade of progress in Text-to-Speech

The Blizzard Challenge offers a unique insight into progress in text-to-speech synthesis over the last decade. By using a very large listening test to compare the performance of a wide range of systems that have been constructed using a common corpus of speech recordings, it is possible to make some direct comparisons between competing techniques. By reviewing over a hundred papers describing all entries to the Challenge since 2005, we can make a useful summary of the most successful techniques adopted by participating teams, as well as drawing some conclusions about where the Blizzard Challenge has succeeded, and where there are still open problems in cross-system comparisons of text-to-speech synthesisers.