SSW14 and Blizzard Challenge 2027 to be held in Maceió

Maceió will host two international events dedicated to speech synthesis in September 2027: the 14th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW14), from 6 to 8 September, and the Blizzard Challenge 2027, on 9 September. SSW14 will be held as a satellite event of INTERSPEECH 2027, which will take place in São Paulo.

SSW is one of the main international forums for research and innovation in speech synthesis. Its programme brings together work on text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, prosody modelling, quality assessment, voice conversion, multilingual and cross-lingual aspects, speech resources, and related applications. The 2027 edition will feature the special theme “Speaking in sub-tongues: embracing culture, heritage and diversity in Brazilian accents”, with particular attention to linguistic diversity, Brazilian accents, spontaneous speech, and prosody.

The Blizzard Challenge 2027, held on the day following SSW14, will focus on the evaluation of speech synthesis systems. This edition will address accented zero-shot TTS for spontaneous Portuguese speech, involving varieties from São Paulo and Recife as well as European Portuguese.

Hosting SSW14 and the Blizzard Challenge in Maceió is part of fonUFAL’s initiatives in speech technologies and in strengthening research on Phonetics, Prosody, and speech synthesis. Bringing the events to Alagoas creates a direct forum for interaction among researchers, students, laboratories, and institutions working at the intersection of Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and speech processing.

SSW14: 6–8 September 2027
Blizzard Challenge 2027: 9 September 2027
Location: Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil

Official SSW & Blizzard 2027 website
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