Anhui's UTSC iFLYTEK Co. claims the championship in Blizzard Challenge 2012, an international competition for corpus-based speech synthesizers. The company has won the title for seven consecutive years since 2006, topping other competitors in index comparison metrics such as similarity, naturalness, intelligibility and paragraph articulation. The honor symbolizes the company's leading status in the field.

For this year's competition, audio books served as the recording speech synthesis database, adding more difficulties such as inaccuracy in segment marking. Paragraph articulation was also added to the index to emphasize the general feeling of pleasantness, intonation and emotion.

The challenge was initiated by the United States, Japan and Britain to better understand and exchange research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers. It is now the most welcomed international competition of its kind.

A large number of top contenders from prestigious research institutions and companies took part in the competition, including Carnegie Mellon University, Edinburgh University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Advanced Telecommunications Research in Japan, IBM Research Laboratory and Microsoft Research Asia.

(anhuinews.com)