Voice Conversion Challenge 2020

Thank you for participating Voice Conversion Challenge 2020!

We are glad to invite you to participate in the 3rd Voice Conversion Challenge to compare different voice conversion systems and approaches using the same voice data.

Voice conversion (VC) refers to digital cloning of a person's voice; it can be used to modify audio waveform so that it appear as if spoken by someone else (target) than the original speaker (source). VC is useful in many applications, such as customizing audio book and avatar voices, dubbing, movie industry, teleconferencing, singing voice modification, voice restoration after surgery, and cloning of voices of historical persons. Since VC technology involves identity conversion, it can also be used to protect the privacy of the individual in social media and sensitive interviews, for instance. For the same reason, VC also enables spoofing (fooling) voice biometric systems and has therefore potential security implications. The VCC2020 challenge, similar to the two earlier editions of the challenge, does not focus on any particular application but aims at improving the core VC technology itself using common data, metrics and baseline systems provided by the organizers. The challenge is open to any interested individual or team. Any potential technological advances resulting from the challenge can be used in any of the above applications. We expect the results to be useful in defining future directions in both security and privacy aspects of voice.

Tasks of the 3rd Challenge

The objective is speaker conversion, which is a well-known basic problem in voice conversion. We plan to prepare two tasks based on nonparallel training: We focus on 24 kHz speech and signal-to-signal conversion strategies. No transcriptions will be provided for the test set, and the use of manual annotations is NOT allowed. Participants are free of using additional data (for training purposes). Please check the rules section for more detailed information.

Timeline

The tentative schedule is as follows: Our timeline has shifted taking into account date changes of INTERSPEECH.

How to Participate?

There is no fee for registration. Please register your team at the following page by March 9th, 2020 if you want to participate in the challenge.

Baseline Systems

For measuring the progress of VC technology, we have built a few baseline systems including the top system of the previous challenge on the new database. We have prepared a few sets of the converted voice samples generated using these baseline systems so that all participants can understand how to build basic systems and have more time to improve their own systems.

Paper Submission

We plan to hold a joint workshop for the Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020. All participants are invited to submit one paper that summarizes their system and shows some results. Each participant can select one of the following two paper categories. Please follow the INTERSPEECH 2020 guidelines and templates (maximum 4 pages + 1 page for reference) when preparing your paper. All papers can be submitted via the following website until Aug. 31st Sep. 7th, 2020. Since the joint workshop is an an ISCA-approved workshop, our proceeding including your papers will be added to ISCA archive. DOI will also be assigned to each paper. Following the ISCA rules, we will review the submitted papers and return review comments to the authors.

Joint Workshop for the Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020

The Joint Workshop for the Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020 will be held online as a satellite workshop of INTERSPEECH 2020. The workshop is open to all and we encourage participation from anyone interested in speech synthesis and voice conversion. If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please visit the workshop website and make the workshop registration.

Summary

Organizers

Contact information: vcc2020__at__vc-challenge.org