The challenge is being organized as part of ICASSP 2023 which aims at the development of a Lightweight, Multi-speaker, Multi-lingual Indic Text-to-Speech (TTS) model using datasets in Marathi, Hindi, and Telugu. These studies are important for data selection in TTS, for various landscapes such as India, Europe, etc which have a large number of languages and their regional variations. TTS corpora in these languages are being built as a part of the SYSPIN project at SPIRE lab, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India, in which large corpora comprising 40 hours of single speaker’s speech in each of nine Indian languages are being collected. This proposal is part of the initiatives taken to open source these corpora and continue to propose challenges in the next two years’ ICASSP as well. 

The challenge aims towards helping and encouraging the advancement of TTS in Indian Languages. The basic challenge is to take the released speech data, build TTS voices, and share the voice in web API form for evaluation. The output from each synthesizer will be evaluated through extensive listening tests. The primary objective of this challenge is understanding and comparing the various approaches to build TTS and simultaneously identifying efficient speech groups across the world.