Independently-organized Satellite Workshops associated with Interspeech 2006 will include:

• SAPA2006
  Date: 16 September 2006
  The objective of the Statistical and Perceptual Audition (SAPA) workshop is to bring together researchers considering perceptually-motivated problems in sound and speech analysis and understanding, employing statistical and machine learning tools.


• Blizzard Challenge 2006
  Date: 16 September 2006
  In order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, Blizzard Challenge 2005 was held last year. We will now have the second challenge as the Blizzard Challenge 2006. The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences. The sentences from each synthesizer will then be evaluated through listening tests.


• Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems
  Date: 16 September 2006
  YRR2006: The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in applied spoken dialog systems research. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop is meant to foster creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialog systems research, and help create a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field.


• Dialogue on Dialogues: Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interactive Systems
  Date: 17 September 2006
  The goal of this one-day workshop is to encourage dialogue on dialogues: multidisciplinary discussions on the evaluation criteria for speech-based systems, descriptions of completed or on-going research, and debates on what is still needed. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on the development of communication models that support robust and efficient interaction in spoken natural language both for commercial dialogue systems and in basic research and, through discussions and working sessions, identify and enumerate criteria for evaluating robust and efficient interaction in spoken dialogue systems.