37.2248, Confs: Blizzard Challenge @ Interspeech 2027 (Brazil)

Fri Jul 3 09:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2248. Fri Jul 03 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2248, Confs: Blizzard Challenge @ Interspeech 2027  (Brazil)

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Date: 01-Jul-2026
From: Sandra Maria Aluisio [sandra at icmc.usp.br]
Subject: Blizzard Challenge @ Interspeech 2027

Blizzard Challenge 2027
Theme: Speaking in sub-tongues: embracing culture, heritage, and
diversity in Brazilian accent

Date: 09-Sep-2027 - 09-Sep-2027
Location: Maceió, Brazil
Contact: Sandra Maria Aluisio
Contact Email: sandra at icmc.usp.br
Meeting URL: https://nilc-nlp.github.io/ssw-2027/index.html

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Phonetics; Phonology
Subject Language(s): Portuguese (por, port1283)

Submission Deadline: 12-Apr-2027

About:
Brazil is a continental country, the largest and most populous in
South America. The Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW) 2027 will bring up
the issue of linguistic diversity to highlight two of several
Brazilian accents.  In line with this theme, the Blizzard Challenge
2027 will focus on synthesising speech for two accents of Brazilian
Portuguese and for one other main variant, European Portuguese from
Portugal.
Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese differ in pronunciation,
vocabulary, grammar, and formal usage. While Brazilian Portuguese has
a more "open", melodic, and nasal sound, European Portuguese is more
"closed", often omitting unstressed vowels.
We will provide participating teams with data covering the three
accents, São Paulo, Recife, and European Portuguese from Portugal,
totalling ~790 hours.
The Challenge:
The task this year is accented zero-shot TTS for spontaneous
Portuguese speech with a mandatory hub and an optional spoke task,
described in the Rules (linked below).
The main difficulty will be to disentangle accent and timbre, allowing
the model to reproduce accentual variations without compromising
speaker identity. This challenge is compounded by the limited
availability of Portuguese data, as well as the fact that we will
provide only spontaneous speech recordings, which may be of lower
quality than typical read speech recordings, making the task even more
demanding. Participating teams will be free to enhance audio quality,
should they choose to. The challenge will provide a large dataset of
approximately 790 hours of speech, covering the 3 accents, but teams
are not required to use all (or indeed any) of this. The target
speakers for the zero-shot Hub and Spoke tasks are unseen and not
included in this dataset, but they will be from one of the three
accents represented in the dataset.
Another challenge is the diverse annotation of the provided datasets.
For all accents, a transcription will be provided, but teams are
allowed to re-transcribe the speech if they wish. Data in the Recife
subset has a manual prosodic segmentation; data in the São Paulo
subset has been automatically segmented by WhisperX; data in the
European Portuguese (EP) subset has also been automatically segmented
by state-of-the-art EP CAMÕES ASR model for transcription-reference
alignment.
Read these first:
Please read the Blizzard 2027 Call for Participation at the SSW &
Blizzard Challenge 2027 Website, which is similar in content to this
page.
Then, read and agree to the Blizzard Challenge 2027 Rules
You should only register for the challenge if you intend to submit an
entry to the challenge and to comply with all the rules
The organising committee this year is led by Sandra M Aluisio and
Renato Moraes from Tarsila Group at The University of São Paulo,
Brazil, Sidney Leal from Tarsila Group and Venturus, Sérgio Paulo from
INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal, Marcos Treviso and Alberto Abad from IST,
Lisbon, Portugal, Adrian Carvalho from University of São Paulo, Brazil
and Frederico de Oliveira, from UFMT and CEIA, Brazil, with assistance
from Simon King from The University of Edinburgh.
Registration:
Register by emailing blizzard-challenge-organisers at googlegroups.com.
We need to know your:
 - preferred team name - the organisers may adjust this so that all
teams have meaningful, unique names
 - affiliation - the name of your University and lab, or your Company
 - the name of the main contact person - this must be exactly one
person who is responsible for all communication with the organiser
 - contact details:
    - main contact person's email address - should be an
institutional/company email address
    - backup email address(es)
    - postal address
    - phone number
Training Material
Available on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/21012364
Audio recordings (WAV format, 16-bit, 24 kHz or 44.1 kHz)
Text transcriptions
Additional Resources:
Two vocoders are suggested, for teams who do not wish to train their
own: HiFi-GAN universal and BigVGAN v2.
We also list below forced phonetic aligners, a machine-readable
pronunciation dictionary, online phonetic dictionaries, and G2P tools:
(1) MFA (Montreal Forced Aligner) dictionary (latest versions)
https://mfa-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dictionary/Portuguese/index.html
-- v2.0.0a (Portuguese, Brazil)
https://mfa-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dictionary/Portuguese/Portuguese%20%28Brazil%29%20MFA%20dictionary%20v2_0_0a.html#Portuguese%20(Brazil)%20MFA%20dictionary%20v2_0_0a
-- v2.0.0a (Portuguese, Portugal)
https://mfa-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dictionary/Portuguese/Portuguese%20%28Portugal%29%20MFA%20dictionary%20v2_0_0a.html
(2) UFPAlign, an open-source, automatic phonetic alignment tool for
Brazilian Portuguese
https://github.com/falabrasil/ufpalign/blob/main/README.en.md
(3) Aeiouadô is a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for
Brazilian Portuguese,
based on the dialect of São Paulo (city):
https://sites.google.com/view/nilc-usp/aeiouadô
(4) Online Phonetic Dictionaries of Portal da Língua Portuguesa
(ILTEC, Portugal)
-- Pronunciation for São Paulo/Brazil (standard):
https://www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/index.php?action=fonetica&act=list&region=spx&search=
-- Pronunciation for Lisbon /Portugal (standard):
https://www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/index.php?action=fonetica&act=list&region=lbx&search=
(5) PETRUS is  a rule-based grapheme-to-phone (G2P) converter for
Brazilian Portuguese
https://github.com/alessandrobokan/PETRUS
Timeline:
This is a preliminary timeline and is subject to change.
July 1, 2026: Challenge announcement and registration open
July 1, 2026: Training dataset released
January 12, 2027: Team registration closes
February 1, 2027: Test dataset released to participants
April 12, 2027: Deadline for participants to submit their systems
(23:59 AoE)
April 13, 2027: Last day for registration fee payment
April 19, 2027: Evaluation systems go live
June 19, 2027: End of evaluation period
June 21, 2027: Results announced
July 21, 2027: Deadline for workshop submissions (23:59 AoE)
August 1, 2027: Notification of acceptance
August 16, 2027: Camera ready version
August 29 to September 2, 2027: INTERSPEECH 2027, São Paulo, Brazil
September 6-8, 2027: SSW14, Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil
September 9, 2027: Blizzard Challenge 2027, Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil
Any questions?
Please contact blizzard-challenge-organisers at googlegroups.com if you
have any questions.
Website: https://nilc-nlp.github.io/ssw-2027/index.html

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