What should you do?

What’s the special session about?

The Pacific region contains over a thousand Indigenous languages across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, spanning Austronesian and Papuan families. These languages have rich phonetics, complex morphologies, and shared features, yet remain severely low-resourced and underrepresented in global speech technology. Many lack even basic digital text or audio corpora, creating urgent challenges for digital inclusion and language preservation. This is where there is potential for speech technology to support documentation, revitalisation, and community-led stewardship of the languages of the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific Voices Special Session aims to bring the stories of Pacific communities building, designing and benefitting from speech technologies. It brings together computational linguists, field linguists, engineers, and Indigenous communities, recognising that collaboration is essential for any meaningful technological progress.

Many Pacific groups are developing their own ethical frameworks, emphasising consent, community governance, and culturally grounded AI practices for their data, making data sovereignty a must-discuss theme in this special session.

We hope that Pacific stories will be main-stream in speech technology discourse and regional networks that unite speech technologists, linguists, and Indigenous communities under shared ethical frameworks will be imagined.

What we hope to achieve?

• Spotlight the clever and bold ideas helping languages of Pacific Ocean find their digital voice, proving you don’t need big data to make a big difference.
  
• Celebrate communities taking charge of their own language data and shaping the rules of technology development through data sovereignty.
  
• Spark new ideas and tech mashups that let closely related Pacific languages help each other shine through cross lingual and multilingual initiatives.

Paper Submission and Session Format

For full details on paper preparation, please click Here. Authors must adhere to the ISCA Code of Ethics and strictly follow the format defined in the Interspeech 2026 paper kit.  When using the electronic submission system, please ensure you select the Pacific Voices Special Session. Note that all submissions will undergo the standard peer review process.

The session format will either be a poster session or oral presentations, depending on the number of accepted papers. We will therefore inform participants about the format shortly after the acceptance notification (June 5, 2026).

We anticipate that the registration fees for Interspeech 2026 will fall within the range of approximately $1000 – $2000 Australian dollars (based on the last years’ registration). However, these figures are indicative and may change once official rates are released.

Important Dates

Who are we?

As organisers, we want this session to echo Interspeech 2026 theme of “Speaking Together.” With the conference being held in Australia which is part of the wider Pacific, there is no better moment to bring Pacific languages, communities, and voices to the centre of the conversation.

We are a group of researchers from the University of Auckland and part of the Speech Research @ UoA Research Group:

• Associate Professor Peter Keegan
• Dr Jesin James
• Dr Isabella Shields
• Dr Satwinder Singh
• Dr Ake Nicholas
• Dr Rolando Coto-Solano (Dartmouth College, United States)

Contact us: jesin.james@auckland.ac.nz