Speech Tech Day

Theme: Speech in Context: Advancing Technology for Diverse Human Communication

As a speech technology community in The Netherlands—including researchers, industry partners and users—we must adopt a critical perspective on mainstream speech technology, which often overlooks the diversity in speech, the rich layers of meaning conveyed through spoken communication, and the subtleties embedded within the speech signal. From pathological speech analysis to non-verbal vocalisations, we need to explore how speech technology can better serve diverse communication needs. This direction includes addressing challenges stemming from speaker characteristics, multilingual contexts, and varying situational demands in human-machine interaction.