{"url":"/dataset/blizzard-challenge-2013","name":"Blizzard Challenge 2013","full_name":"Blizzard Challenge 2013 - English language tasks","description_markdown":"The English data for voice building was obtained, prepared and provided the the challenge by Lessac Technologies Inc., having originally came from the publishers Voice Factory International Inc. It comprises speech from one female professional narrator & actress, Catherine ‘Bobbie’ Byers, reading the text of a collection of classic novels. These had been divided by the publishers of the original audiobooks into a number of genres, such as “Classic Novels”, “Women’s Classics”, “Young Readers” and so on.","description_withheld":null,"homepage":"http://www.festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2013.html","introduced_date":"2013-09-03","introduced_date_note":null,"introduced_by":{"paper":"/paper/the-blizzard-challenge-2013","title":"The Blizzard Challenge 2013","first_author":"Simon King","url":null},"license":null,"modalities":[{"name":"Audio","url":"/datasets/modality/audio"}],"tasks":[{"name":"Speech Synthesis","url":"/task/speech-synthesis","datasets_with_task":"/datasets/task/speech-synthesis"},{"name":"Audio Generation","url":"/task/audio-generation","datasets_with_task":"/datasets/task/audio-generation"}],"languages":[{"name":"English","url":"/datasets/language/english"}],"variants":["Blizzard Challenge 2013"],"data_loaders":[],"num_papers_in_archive":5,"source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28"},"benchmarks":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/speech-synthesis-on-blizzard-challenge-2013","task":"Speech Synthesis","dataset_variant":"Blizzard Challenge 2013","rows":2,"metrics":["NLL"],"first_row_in_archive_order":{"model":"SampleRNN (3-tier)","paper":"/paper/samplernn-an-unconditional-end-to-end-neural","metrics":{"NLL":"1.387"},"code_links":[{"title":"soroushmehr/sampleRNN_ICLR2017","url":"https://github.com/soroushmehr/sampleRNN_ICLR2017"},{"title":"deepsound-project/samplernn-pytorch","url":"https://github.com/deepsound-project/samplernn-pytorch"},{"title":"dada-bots/dadabots_sampleRNN","url":"https://github.com/dada-bots/dadabots_sampleRNN"},{"title":"cchinchristopherj/Concert-of-Whales","url":"https://github.com/cchinchristopherj/Concert-of-Whales"}]},"note":"rows are the archive's own order at snapshot; nothing here re-ranks them"}],"papers_with_a_benchmark_row":[{"paper":"/paper/samplernn-an-unconditional-end-to-end-neural","title":"SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model","date":"2016-12-22","rows_on_this_dataset":2,"code_links":4,"syntology":{"read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","samples_harvested":11,"samples_ran":0,"samples_unverified":11,"pointer_only_for_licence":0,"claim":"Per-sample execution on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim."}}],"syntology_totals":{"read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","papers_with_samples":1,"samples_harvested":11,"samples_ran":0,"samples_unverified":11,"pointer_only_for_licence":0,"papers_with_no_sample_that_ran":1,"note":"the per-paper counts above, summed; not a rate"},"papers_note":"The archive never published its papers-using-dataset list; these are papers with a leaderboard row on this dataset's benchmarks."}