This paper describes the INESC-ID participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2008, which consisted in building the two English voices. We have been developing a new European Portuguese TTS system, called DIXI, for the last two years. This year, the system was already stable enough to be used in the challenge,after a partial adaptation to support synthesis in English.

The major motivation for our participation in this year’s edition of the challenge was to evaluate to what extent our unsupervised and less resource-demanding voice building methods, very successfully applied in limited domain applications, can be used in open domain synthesis.