#17 Get Ready for Interspeech 2025 - Rotterdam edition

Meet Catarina Bolteho PostDoctoral researcher in INESC-ID and one of the original hosts of Speech Pitch this time as a guest.Host: Pascal HeckerPost-production: Wenxi Fei

Meet Takayuki Arai Professor in Sophia University with research interest in Speech Communication, Acoustics, Acoustic Phonetics, Speech Processing for People with Communication Disorders. He was a part of Show and TellHost: Paige TuttösíPost-production: Snigdha Banik

Meet Björn Professor of Health Informatics at TUM and Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee Professor at National Tsing Hua University.Host: Pascal Hecker Post-production: Wei Xue

Meet Yaroslav Getman, PhD Candidate at Aalto University, specializing in self-supervised speech representation learning and its applications in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech technology for underrepresented languages. Host: Priyanshi PalPost-production: Wenxi Fei

Meet Robin Netzorg PhD researcher at UC Berkeley and Juliana Francis PhD researcher in KTH Royal Institute of Technology.Host: Paige TuttösíPost-production: Snigdha Banik

On Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th Meet us in Ahoy Center at Dock 17 From 09.00 – 11.00 and from 14.00 – 17.00

Overall 105 mentees and 40 mentors registered, will meet us on 19th of August 2025, during Interspeech 2025.This is the highest participation EVER!!Round table eventLocation: Foyer 2.2Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30pmOne-on-one mentoring is up to the participants availability during Interspeech.

Meet us on 21st of August 2025 Location: room Port 1BTime: 12:00pm - 1:30 pmRegistration Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUo0xDH5la8yjr9B4TWYrw3lRwsyTfR7wqwOpDu-_cCqn2sg/viewformMentors: Felix Burkhardt (audEERING GmbH, Germany), Ting Dang (University of Melbourne, Australia), José González-López (University of Granada, Spain), Catherine Lai (Universita of Edinburgh, Scotland)

In this episode we share information about Rotterdam, the host city of Interspeech 2025. You will learn how you can travel from the airport to the conference venue itself, what to pack for this trip, the food culture of Netherlands, fun activities and some survival Dutch.Listen to:10+1 fun facts about Rotterdam HERESurvival Dutch words HEREHosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Wei XueGuest Host: Marjolein van OsEditors: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Mohammed Mosuily, Paige Tuttösí, Snigdha Banik, Wenxi Fei0:00:00 - Intro00:00:32 - Introduction Marjolein00:01:23 - Rotterdam00:03:22 - View Points and Architecture00:07:11 - Sightseeing: Cube Houses00:08:24 - Sightseeing: Markthal00:09:04 - Other cities in the Netherlands00:10:17 - Nicknames of buildings00:11:23 - Survival Information: language00:12:07 - Survival Information: currency and public transportation00:14:25 - Survival Information: safety, red light district00:17:04 - Survival Information: the weather00:19:17 - Survival Information: what to pack00:21:54 - Survival Information: how to get to the Interspeech venue00:23:52 - Survival Information: trains00:25:50 - Survival information: accommodation00:27:47 - Food00:33:01 - Customs in restaurants00:39:55 - Desserts and candies00:41:12 - Souvenirs00:45:26 - Other cities to visit00:50:53 - Windmills in the Netherlands00:52:41 - Survival Dutch00:53:31 - Emergency numbers00:54:26 - See you all in Rotterdam!00:55:02 - Outro

In this episode, Georgia Maniati, a Speech Scientist specializing in Text-to-Speech, shares her career path. She recounts her evolution from a linguist to a speech scientist, detailing her experiences in Greece, Edinburgh, and Italy, and how these shaped her current role. Georgia also discusses the current hurdles in text-to-speech technology, particularly for low-resource languages such as Greek.00:00:11 - intro00:00:49- Georgia's vita00:10:20 - Fellowships for young researchers00:17:04- Georgia's role at Samsung00:21:31 - hard skills in her position00:26:47 - recent, exciting projects she worked on00:31:22 - challenges in developing synthetic voices00:33:41 - Greek is a low-resource language, which challenges does it imply?00:34:38 - naturalness of TTS00:39:03 - mentoring and volunteering activities00:43:37 - young female researchers in speech00:45:20 - science communication for non expert audiences  0:53:32 - gender bias in TTS00:53:37 - current blind spots in industry00:56:08 - biggest challenges in her journey00:59:38 - biggest motivation at work and what's next01:01:11 - what did she wish to know earlier in her career?01:02:33 - the question from Titouan Parcollet01:03:49 - her question for the next guest01:04:19 - outro