IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) workshop is a flagship event of the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Committee and a premier international forum for advances in speech and language technologies, spanning foundational research, system

development, and real-world deployment. The workshop typically attracts 300 attendees from academia and industry, including senior researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from leading institutions and companies worldwide.

This year, SLT will be held in Palermo, Sicily, Italy on December 13th-16th 2026. The city of Palermo is at the crossroads of culture and emerging technological innovation. The region's growing digital ecosystem and startup activity create valuable opportunities for research, talent engagement, and long-term industrial partnership.

The Special Theme for SLT 2026 is Spoken Language Technology for Social Wellbeing in the Digital Privacy Era.

SLT 2026 will feature insightful plenary talks given by four outstanding experts: 

• Michael Auli – Meta AI (USA)
  Chief Scientist and internationally recognized leading researcher in the fields of generative artificial intelligence, large language models, and speech technology. He has led major advances in neural models for language and machine translation.
• Abeer Alwan – University of California (USA)
  Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the world’s foremost experts in speech processing, robust speech recognition, inclusive voice technologies, and speech analysis.
• Simon King – University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
  Professor and leading scientist in the fields of speech synthesis, text-to-speech, and spoken dialogue systems. An internationally recognized authority in voice technologies and human–machine communication.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA)
  World-renowned scientist in conversational AI systems, spoken language understanding, dialogue systems, and intelligent voice assistants.

In addition, leading academic/industrial innovators will enrich the 2026 SLT program with three invited speeches:

• Chao-Han Huck Yang – Apple Inc. (USA)
  Researcher active in the fields of speech foundation models, audio-language models, and multimodal AI.
• Rahul Gupta – Amazon (USA)
  Senior Scientist engaged in industrial research on speech recognition, spoken language understanding, and advanced conversational systems.
• Sandra Disner – University of Southern California (USA)
  Expert in computational linguistics, phonetics, and speech technologies applied to human communication.

IEEE SLT 2026 will foster collaboration between academia and industry through an industry exhibition, a job fair, and dynamic industry workshops and panels. Join us in Palermo!

Open Calls:

• Become an SLT Sponsor: https://attend.ieee.org/slt-2026/call-for-sponsorships/  
• Submit a paper: https://attend.ieee.org/slt-2026/call-for-papers/  

For more details and registration, visit https://attend.ieee.org/slt-2026/