Speech for Social Good Workshop, 2022

Accepted as a Satellite Event at Interspeech 2022

Despite the fact that speech is the most natural form of human communication, the appeal of speech technologies has been inhibited by their limited availability and accessibility. Globally, speech technologies, including recognition and generation, are concentrated in regions of relative economic stability, which naturally excludes low resource languages from mainstream research. Even where available, these systems have biases in gender and accent, and are mostly unusable for individuals with speech impediments. Further, even though modelling and data curation are very important in academic circles, deployment and the challenges thereof in real world scenarios are often not spoken about. As speech technologies continue to be employed in an increasing number of application areas - despite the aforementioned shortcomings - we aim to highlight research that will make speech technologies more inclusive and useful for all, and believe that this workshop will provide a platform to address and highlight the social problems of incumbent speech systems.

Though we highlight a few topics of interest below, we invite submissions of any applications of speech technologies to social good:

1. Bias in Speech Technologies - Uncovering and mitigating gender, racial, and other biases in recognition or generation systems,
2. Impaired Speech - Developing better ASR, learning aids, and diagnostic tools for individuals with speech impediments or other medical conditions
3. Support for seniors - synthesis and dialog systems that address the unique challenges brought on by age,
4. Improving speech intelligibility - better synthesis systems for hearing-impaired individuals,
5. Low Resource Languages - Developing data efficient systems for low resource languages, low resource data collection and curation, challenges in building such systems, challenges in collecting low resource data, case studies in low-resource languages,
6. Affective computing - ASR systems for emotion recognition, and synthesis/dialog systems for positive human-computer interaction, identifying signs of depression and other mental health conditions,
7. Challenges of Speech for Social Good - research and survey papers highlighting the challenges of designing such systems, privacy and ethical concerns, identifying and preventing potential misuse of speech systems,
8. Social good, justice, equity : surveys on demographic usage of speech technologies including identification of most typical user types, and which groups are currently most disadvantaged by these systems, how speech systems can be used to challenge the existing power structures,
9. Recommendations on the future of speech technologies : papers that address the current state of affairs in speech technologies and make recommendations to researchers for critical considerations that must be made in designing future speech technologies,
10. Case studies : case studies of real world speech systems deployment, social and ethical issues in use and deployment of speech systems, etc.