On the just-concluded "Blizzard Challenge 2011" international english speech synthesis competition, the entry of USTC iFLYTEK Speech Joint Laboratory ranked first place on overall performance. The wonderful ranking, which is the 6th time in succession since 2006, fully shows the Lab's solid leading position in international speech synthesis field.

As the largest and most influential English speech synthesis competition, The previous Blizzard Challenge had attracted many world-class research institutes and companies, such as Carnegie-Mellon University, Edinburgh University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), IBM Research Laboratory and Microsoft Research Asia etc. Compared with previous competitions, the competition this year had a tighter time limit, higher difficulty level and heavier tasks. Under great competing pressure, USTC iFLYTEK enhanced the performance quality of the system with its solid accumulation and excellent technic. In the three core tests on similarity, naturalness and synthesis dictation error rate, the entry of USTC iFLYTEK ranked third in synthesis dictation error rate and first in the other two tests among all the twelve entries.

USTC iFLYTEK Speech Joint Laboratory is a research institute co-founded by USTC and USTC iFLYTEK Co, Ltd. With the long-term support of 863 Project and National Natural Science Foundation of China, the lab is dedicated to speech and language technology research, and is recognized as one of the most well-known institute on speech technology all over the world. The lab is now in leading place in many key technologies such as multi-language speech synthesis, Voice Recognition and oral evalutaion etc.