Welcome to Our Science Festival of Interspeech 2025!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Join Us at the 1st Speech Science Festival – Interspeech 2025

Sunday, August 17 | Ahoy, Rotterdam

As part of Interspeech 2025, we are excited to launch the very first Speech Science Festival—a unique public outreach event designed to connect cutting-edge speech research with society. We warmly invite researchers and industry professionals from across the entire speech science and speech technology spectrum to contribute, participate, and help shape this new platform for engagement.

This is your chance to share your work beyond the scientific community—through interactive, hands-on formats that inspire, inform, and spark curiosity among people of all ages and backgrounds.

Why a Speech Science Festival?

The Speech Science Festival is a new initiative aimed at making the richness and diversity of speech research tangible, relatable, and accessible to a wider public audience. As speech technologies become increasingly embedded in our daily lives, public understanding of their underlying science—and their impact—is more important than ever.

We want to highlight not only technological innovations but also the fundamental speech science behind them:

• How do humans produce, perceive, and process speech?

• How do we model variation across speakers, languages, and contexts?

• What role does speech play in human communication, identity, and accessibility?

• How do we ensure our technologies are inclusive, ethical, and grounded in real-world needs?

This event brings speech scientists and technologists together to showcase the field in all its complexity and relevance.

Who should get involved?

We welcome contributions from:

• Academic researchers in fields such as phonetics, phonology, linguistics, communication sciences, speech pathology, cognitive science, and computer science.

• Industry professionals working on ASR, TTS, voice assistants, voice biometrics, speech data collection, inclusive speech technologies, and beyond.

• Research institutes, labs, startups, and companies with a passion for public engagement.

Whether you’re studying prosody, training a multilingual model, developing speech tools for clinical applications, or visualizing voice acoustics—you’re invited.

What kind of contributions are we looking for?

We're curating a program filled with interactive demos, hands-on experiments, and engaging micro-talks. Unlike academic presentations, these contributions should be geared toward public understanding and participation.

Ideal formats include

• Live demonstrations (e.g., visualizing the voice, speech synthesis, accent detection)

• Interactive experiments (e.g., speech illusions, tongue twisters, perception tests)

• Citizen science activities (e.g., dialect mapping, crowd-sourced speech data)

• Short talks with broad appeal (e.g., “What’s in a Voice?”, “How Speech Shapes Identity”)

• Informal Q&A sessions ("Book a Researcher") and Science Slam contributions

We encourage collaboration across disciplines and institutions to develop compelling and creative ways to engage with the public.

Preliminary Program Highlights

Morning (10:00-15:00):

• Opening Ceremony on the value of science communication in the speech field

• Flash Talks & Demos: Rapid-fire talks with corresponding hands-on stations

• Citizen Science: Invite the public to contribute to your research

Afternoon (14:00–17:00):

• Science Slam: Short, impactful presentations around the theme “More Inclusive Speech Technology.”

• Book a Researcher: Public conversations with experts from academia and industry

• Hackathon Demos: Live presentations from our Hackathon finalists

Why should you participate?

• Visibility: Present your work to a broader audience and showcase its societal relevance

• Impact: Contribute to public understanding of speech science and technology

• Recruitment: Connect with the next generation of students and curious minds

• Engagement: Explore new ways to communicate your research and gain valuable outreach experience

Let’s work together to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of our field—from articulatory phonetics to neural networks, from multilingual voice tech to speech disorders—and demonstrate how it all connects to real-world challenges and opportunities.

Ready to contribute?

Submit your demo idea, flash talk, or interactive format via our contribution form. If you have an idea but aren’t sure how to shape it for a public audience, we’re happy to support you in the design process.

Contact

For questions, suggestions, or collaborations, please reach out to the organizing team at speechsciencefestival@interspeech2025.org.

Let’s make the Speech Science Festival a celebration of everything our field has to offer—scientific depth, technological innovation, and societal relevance.

Interspeech 2025

PCO: TU Delft Events

Delft University of Technology

Communication Department

Prometheusplein 1

2628 ZC Delft

The Netherlands

Email: pco@interspeech2025.org

X (formerly Twitter): @ISCAInterspeech

Bluesky: @interspeech.bsky.social

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