2nd MLC-SLM Workshop set for INTERSPEECH 2026 in Sydney

The 2nd Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model Workshop will be held Oct. 2, 2026, at ICC Sydney as a satellite event of INTERSPEECH 2026. The full-day program will feature keynote talks, challenge results, winning team presentations and a poster session focused on multilingual conversational speech technologies.

Why it matters: - The workshop will gather researchers and industry professionals working on multilingual conversational speech technologies. - The event sits alongside INTERSPEECH 2026, giving the challenge and workshop a wider global research audience. - The program will showcase both research progress and practical system-building results from the 2nd MLC-SLM Challenge 2026.

What happened: - The 2nd Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model Workshop is scheduled for Oct. 2, 2026, at ICC Sydney in Sydney. - The workshop will run as a satellite workshop of INTERSPEECH 2026. - The event will take place in rooms C2.2 and C2.3. - Registration for the workshop is open, and the participation fee is AUD 80. - The workshop will run from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM.

The details: - The full-day program will include five keynote talks, the Challenge Summary & Awards Ceremony, oral sessions and a poster session. - The keynote speakers are Yonghong Yan of the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Jinyu Li of Microsoft; Kai Yu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and AISpeech; Hung-yi Lee of National Taiwan University; and Shinnosuke Takamichi of Keio University. - The keynote talks will focus on research and developments in speech, language models and related AI technologies. - The workshop will announce the final results of the 2nd MLC-SLM Challenge 2026. - Five winning teams will present their systems, technical approaches and research results during oral sessions. - The winning-team presentations are titled: The MOSS Systems for the MLC-SLM Challenge 2026; Transsion’s Speaker-Attributed Multilingual ASR System for the MLC-SLM 2026 Challenge; HINTT Submission to the 2nd MLC-SLM Challenge: Comparing Cascaded and Unified Approaches to Diarization and ASR; A Data-Centric LoRA Recipe for Multilingual Conversational Speech Recognition; and SEAR: Segment-Evidence-Aware Routing for Weak-to-Strong Multilingual Speech MCQ. - The workshop will close with a poster session that gives participants another chance to present work and exchange ideas. - Registrants can either select the workshop while registering for INTERSPEECH 2026 or complete the workshop registration form in advance and pay on site. - More information is available in the full agenda and latest updates.

Between the lines: - The workshop is designed to connect academic research, industry use cases and challenge-based evaluation in one day. - The mix of keynote talks, awards and team presentations suggests the event is meant to move beyond theory and highlight deployable multilingual speech systems. - Holding the workshop within INTERSPEECH 2026 should help surface the work to a broader speech and AI community.

What's next: - Attendees will gather on Oct. 2 for the challenge awards, keynote talks, oral sessions and poster presentations. - Organizers will share the full agenda and updates ahead of the workshop. - Researchers and INTERSPEECH 2026 attendees interested in multilingual conversational speech technologies can register now.

The bottom line: - The 2nd MLC-SLM Workshop will turn INTERSPEECH 2026 in Sydney into a showcase for multilingual conversational speech research, challenge results and emerging AI systems.