CONVERGENCE Doctoral researcher Kalle Lahtinen took part in the 27th Interspeech conference, which was held September 17 – October 1, 2026, in Sydney. The theme of the conference for 2026 was “Speaking Together”. Interspeech is an annual scientific conference organized by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). Interspeech conferences include papers covering all the scientific and technological aspects of speech. Kalle was accompanied on the trip by his second supervisor Liisa Mustanoja (Research Centre Plural, Tampere University) and Einari Vaaras, a colleague from the Speech and Cognitionresearch group (Signal processing research centre, Tampere University). There were a total of 3021 submitted papers that were reviewed (2871 main track papers, 286 long papers) with a 46.52% acceptance rate for normal papers, and 29.93% for long papers.
During the conference, Kalle and Liisa presented a poster describing the work of Lahtinen, Mustanoja and Räsänen titled “Looking for Affect in Spontaneous Finnish Speech through Linguistic Interpretability”. The accepted conference paper was the third peer-reviewed article to be included in Kalle’s doctoral dissertation. In their work, they studied the individual and combinatory roles of different content (text) and acoustic (audio) based speech features in the perception of affect in spontaneous Finnish speech.
In addition to presenting their work, Kalle also attended workshops on “Towards inclusive, personalized, and empathetic spoken language systems” and “Forensic speaker comparison in practice – An introduction”. As expected, the conference also offered a large variety of interesting and thought-provoking oral presentations, poster events and social gatherings.
The conference offered a snapshot on the status of speech science and technology, introducing work from basic linguistic research to state-of-the-art speech applications.