When I was asked to be Technical Program Chair for Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam, I had no idea of the amount of work involved in this task. But after months of hard work, together with Martin Cooke (Ikerbasque, Spain), Tomi Kinnunen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland), and Antoine Serrurier (ISCA, Germany), we pulled it off and were able to see the fruits of our labor first-hand. Of course we didn’t do it all alone. We had a lot of help from all the (lead) area chairs and all the reviewers who reviewed the papers. If you are interested to read more about what the work entailed, you can read the TPC welcome message in the Interspeech 2025 Abstract Book.
But then it was finally time for Interspeech last month at Ahoy Rotterdam. Thanks to the PCO, the people of Ahoy and the AV company Improve, it looked amazing! The huge banners in the lobby and the exhibition space were impressive and the digital poster boards were a big hit. It was a little overwhelming to try and take it all in while also being in lots of meetings for ISCA, but in the end I did manage to attend a few oral sessions and walk around several poster sessions. I really enjoyed this year’s keynote speeches as well and it was so good to talk to so many people in person.
Some of the presentations I really enjoyed were:
Livia Qian, Carol Figueroa, and Gabriel Skantze, “Representation of Perceived Prosodic Similarity of Conversational Feedback“
Herman Kamper, Benjamin van Niekerk, Julian Zaïdi, Marc-André Carbonneau, “LinearVC: Linear Transformations of Self-Supervised Features Through the Lens of Voice Conversion“
Sébastien Le Maguer, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Damien Lolive, Naomi Harte, Juraj Šimko, “Enabling the replicability of speech synthesis perceptual evaluations“
Of course there was much more, including survey talks and special sessions and challenges and several sessions on speech science and technology for health. You can find all the pdfs from Interspeech 2025 on the ISCA Archive. I for one am excited for next year’s Interspeech in Sydney, Australia. See you there?
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