IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) 2026 will take place in Palermo, Sicily, marking the workshop's return to Europe for only the second time in its history, following its 2018 edition in Athens, Greece. As one of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's flagship workshops in spoken language technology, SLT 2026 will center on the theme, "Spoken Language Technology for Social Wellbeing in the Digital Privacy Era," exploring how advances in foundation models and generative AI are transforming speech and language technologies while addressing critical challenges in privacy, trustworthiness, and responsible AI. The workshop is organized by a highly diverse international committee representing academia and industry across multiple continents, reflecting a strong balance of scientific expertise, technology innovation, gender, and regional representation.

SLT 2026 also marks several important milestones for the research community. It is the first IEEE workshop in the speech and language processing community to adopt the OpenReview platform for paper submission and peer review, advancing transparency and improving alignment between reviewer expertise and submitted research. The workshop has received approximately 750 paper submissions—the largest number in its history and nearly double that of the previous edition. Attendees can look forward to an outstanding technical program featuring four special sessions, four community challenges, and keynote presentations from internationally recognized leaders Abeer Alwan (UCLA), Simon King (University of Edinburgh), Michael Auli (Meta FAIR), and Dilek Hakkani-Tür (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).

Bringing together researchers from academia, industry, and government laboratories, SLT 2026 will provide an exceptional forum for sharing the latest advances in spoken language technology and fostering new collaborations across disciplines and application areas. As the final standalone SLT workshop before the launch of the IEEE Audio, Speech and Language Intelligence (ASLI) conference in 2027, this landmark edition represents both a celebration of SLT's legacy and an exciting step toward the future of the speech and language research community.