SLT 2026 — IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop
by IEEE Signal Processing Society
A 300-person IEEE workshop on speech, LLMs and privacy — in Palermo
About This Event
The 2026 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2026) runs 13-16 December 2026 at the Hotel Saracen Sands in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, hosted by the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Spoken Language Technology committee. Its 2026 theme is 'Spoken Language Technology for Social Wellbeing in the Digital Privacy Era', and the call covers all areas of spoken language processing: automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, spoken language understanding, text-to-speech, speech translation and large language models for spoken language processing, with explicit emphasis on privacy-preserving speech recognition and on fairness, bias and accountability in speech systems. SLT typically draws around 300 attendees from academia and industry. The plenary slate features Michael Auli of Meta AI, Abeer Alwan, Simon King of the University of Edinburgh and Dilek Hakkani-Tur of the University of Illinois, with invited speakers from Apple, Amazon and USC.
Key Dates & Deadlines
- Notification to authors
- SPS journal paper submission deadline
- Camera-ready deadline
- Author and early-bird registration deadline
At a Glance
- Date
- December 13–16, 2026
- Location
- Hotel Saracen Sands, Palermo, Italy
- Format
- In-Person
- Event Type
- Workshop
- Status
- Upcoming
- Expected Attendance
- 300
- Pricing
- Paid
- Organizer
- IEEE Signal Processing Society
- Added
- Aug 18, 2026
- Updated
- Aug 18, 2026
Topics & Focus Areas
Who Should Attend
- ✓Speech and audio machine learning engineers
- ✓Conversational AI product leads
- ✓Heads of AI at contact-centre and healthcare vendors
- ✓Privacy and compliance leads
- ✓Voice platform architects
- ✓Academic speech researchers
- ✓Technical recruiters for speech teams
Why Attend
Voice is where the next wave of enterprise agents lands — contact centres, in-car assistants, clinical documentation — and SLT is small enough that a head of AI can actually talk to the people building the underlying models. At roughly 300 attendees with plenaries from Meta AI and invited talks from Apple and Amazon, the ratio of substance to booth traffic is unusually good. The 2026 privacy theme is directly useful to anyone deploying voice under GDPR or sector-specific rules, the challenges track gives an independent basis for comparing ASR and TTS vendors, and the job fair makes it a practical recruiting stop for scarce speech engineers.
Event Features
- ✓Plenary talks from Michael Auli (Meta AI), Abeer Alwan, Simon King (University of Edinburgh) and Dilek Hakkani-Tur (University of Illinois)
- ✓Invited industry and academic speakers from Apple, Amazon and USC
- ✓Special theme: Spoken Language Technology for Social Wellbeing in the Digital Privacy Era
- ✓Challenges and special sessions track with its own proposal and review cycle
- ✓Demonstration paper track
- ✓Job fair and industry exhibition
- ✓IEEE SPS journal paper track submitted alongside the workshop
What Makes This Unique
- ★Roughly 300 attendees rather than a mega-conference, so plenary speakers are actually reachable
- ★The IEEE Signal Processing Society's flagship workshop dedicated to spoken language technology, complementing ICASSP and Interspeech
- ★A 2026 theme explicitly built around privacy-preserving speech and around fairness, bias and accountability
- ★A dedicated challenges track where competing systems are compared on shared tasks
- ★A job fair and industry exhibition built into the programme, unusual for a research workshop
Featured Speakers From
Industries Represented
Pricing Details
Registration opened 5 August 2026 and the author and early-registration deadline is 23 September 2026. Specific rates are not published on the workshop's public pages as of 18 August 2026.
Organizer
IEEE Signal Processing Society
signalprocessingsociety.org/Frequently Asked
- When is SLT 2026?
- SLT 2026 takes place December 13–16, 2026 in Palermo, Italy.
- Where is SLT 2026 held?
- SLT 2026 is held in Palermo, Italy. The event format is in-person.
- What is the SLT 2026 submission deadline?
- The next SLT 2026 deadline is notification to authors on Sep 8, 2026. Remaining dates: SPS journal paper submission deadline — Sep 11, 2026; Camera-ready deadline — Sep 16, 2026; Author and early-bird registration deadline — Sep 23, 2026.
- How much does SLT 2026 cost?
- SLT 2026 is paid. Registration opened 5 August 2026 and the author and early-registration deadline is 23 September 2026. Specific rates are not published on the workshop's public pages as of 18 August 2026.
- Who should attend SLT 2026?
- SLT 2026 is aimed at Speech and audio machine learning engineers, Conversational AI product leads, Heads of AI at contact-centre and healthcare vendors, Privacy and compliance leads, Voice platform architects, Academic speech researchers, Technical recruiters for speech teams.
- What topics does SLT 2026 cover?
- SLT 2026 covers Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Text-to-Speech, Speaker Recognition, Large Language Models, Speech Translation, Privacy-Preserving AI, Conversational AI.
Sources
This page was written from 3 sources, 1 on domains other than attend.ieee.org.
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