Speech Pitch

Meet us on 21st of August 2025

Location: room Port 1B

Time: 12:00pm - 1:30 pm

Registration Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUo0xDH5la8yjr9B4TWYrw3lRwsyTfR7wqwOpDu-_cCqn2sg/viewform

Mentors: 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 HERE
• Survival Dutch words HERE

Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Wei Xue

Guest Host: Marjolein van Os

Editors: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Mohammed Mosuily, Paige Tuttösí, Snigdha Banik, Wenxi Fei

0:00:00 - Intro

00:00:32 - Introduction Marjolein

00:01:23 - Rotterdam

00:03:22 - View Points and Architecture

00:07:11 - Sightseeing: Cube Houses

00:08:24 - Sightseeing: Markthal

00:09:04 - Other cities in the Netherlands

00:10:17 - Nicknames of buildings

00:11:23 - Survival Information: language

00:12:07 - Survival Information: currency and public transportation

00:14:25 - Survival Information: safety, red light district

00:17:04 - Survival Information: the weather

00:19:17 - Survival Information: what to pack

00:21:54 - Survival Information: how to get to the Interspeech venue

00:23:52 - Survival Information: trains

00:25:50 - Survival information: accommodation

00:27:47 - Food

00:33:01 - Customs in restaurants

00:39:55 - Desserts and candies

00:41:12 - Souvenirs

00:45:26 - Other cities to visit

00:50:53 - Windmills in the Netherlands

00:52:41 - Survival Dutch

00:53:31 - Emergency numbers

00:54:26 - 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 - intro

00:00:49- Georgia's vita

00:10:20 - Fellowships for young researchers

00:17:04- Georgia's role at Samsung

00:21:31 - hard skills in her position

00:26:47 - recent, exciting projects she worked on

00:31:22 - challenges in developing synthetic voices

00:33:41 - Greek is a low-resource language, which challenges does it imply?

00:34:38 - naturalness of TTS

00:39:03 - mentoring and volunteering activities

00:43:37 - young female researchers in speech

00:45:20 - science communication for non expert audiences  

0:53:32 - gender bias in TTS

00:53:37 - current blind spots in industry

00:56:08 - biggest challenges in her journey

00:59:38 - biggest motivation at work and what's next

01:01:11 - what did she wish to know earlier in her career?

01:02:33 - the question from Titouan Parcollet

01:03:49 - her question for the next guest

01:04:19 - outro

The most long-awaited episode of 2025, the mental health episode is here.

In this episode the Speech Pitch team asked your question to Jasmina Bakic, who is a scientific researcher and psychologist in a psychology practice person-centered in Amsterdam. You will hear 3 stories from our audience and Jasmina's responses to them and to the many questions related to burn out, self doubt, toxic enviroments, self-harm, ADHD and how to seek for help.

Hosts: Priyanshi Pal, Spyretta Leivaditi, Orchid Chetia Phukan, Sarthak Jain

Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kalliopi Kakamouka

0:00:00 intro

0:00:x introducing Jasmina and her areas of interest at work

0:04:52 first story: burn out

0:15:35 potential way outs for burnout

0:17:50 second story: depression upon entering a PhD

0:23:15 should you share mental health concerns with your supervisor?

0:25:25 if your advisor is not empathetic, how should you get help instead?

0:27:55 third story: how do I build effective relationships with my co-workers

0:37:50 how do you ensure better collaboration in the research effort?

0:43:42 short question section: how can one stay focused if your supervisor doesn't support you

0:47:30 how can one cope with toxic behaviour of people around you?

0:57:00 how do you know that resigning is the right decision?

1:00:49 how to get out of a phase of self-doubt?

1:04:56 what is a healthy way of self-worth?

1:11:28 Balance between competition and your own pace

1:14:57 fear of being judged to ask "stupid questions"

1:19:35 how can you react to unfruitful feedback?

1:22:02 how to overcome the feeling of not being sufficient

1:25:56 how to spot someone who might be considering self-harm

1:29:40 how to persuade someone to seek help

1:32:08 how can a supervisor grief after an unfortunate event

1:36:40 ADHD in adults

1:43:08 take-home-message

1:43:48 outro

This is the uncut version of our episode with Say IT Labs. We meet Lukas Latacz and Erich Reiter, founders of Say IT Labs, and discuss their career, the founding process of their company, and their contribution to pathological speech using their Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi

Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kay Berkling, Kalliopi Kakamouka, Mohammed Mosuily

0:00:00 - Intro

0:00:30 - Introducing Erich Reiter and Lukas Latacz

0:04:22 - The origin story of SAY IT Labs

0:05:56 - How Erich came to Belgium

0:07:33 - Challenges when founding the company

0:12:18 - How did they secure initial funding

0:15:00 - SAY IT Labs as a company

0:19:43 - The science of stuttering and the game stutter stars

0:26:10- How is it validated?

0:30:00 - Different languages

0:31:35 - Smart glasses for Parkinson's

0:38:30 - Advice for young entrepreneurs

0:47:20 - Work life balance

0:53:08 - Question from Titouan: What is your biggest challenge to overcome for your product to succeed?

0:56:44 - Question for the next guest: How to transition from monolingual to multilingual approaches?

0:57:06 - Support SAY IT Labs: interns

0:57:50: - Outro

In this episode we meet Lukas Latacz and Erich Reiter, founders of SAY IT Labs, and discuss their career, the founding process of their company, and their contribution to pathological speech using their Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi

Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kalliopi Kakamouka, Orchid Chetia Phukan, Sarthak Jain, Vishakha Choudhary

Titouan Parcollet is a “Research Scientist at the Samsung AI Center Cambridge” and an “adjunct researcher at the Cambridge Machine Learning Systems Lab from the University of Cambridge”. Further, he is an “Associate Professor on leave from the Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon (LIA) and Avignon Université (FR)”. His current Research focus is on self-supervised / representation learning and on continual learning. He played an instrumental part in the development of SpeechBrain and Pytorch-Kaldi.

In this episode you will follow Titouan’s origin story, how he entered university, his PhD journey, his teaching approach and of course his current research topics.

Hosts: Spyretta Leivaditi, Pascal Hecker

Editors: Pascal Hecker, Janice Huang and Snigdha Banik

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:20 - Welcoming Titouan Parcollet

00:01:01 - Titouan's entry into university and early career

00:05:48 - Titouan's PhD journey

00:15:33 - PhD exchange with the Mila institute

00:17:58 - Importance of a PhD advisor and how to chose your PhD position

00:27:50 - Titouan's teaching approach and experience

00:35:50 - His current research topic and his view on the field

00:40:42 - His view on academia and industry

00:43:26 - Work-life balance, mental health, burnout

00:54:34  -Imposter syndrome

01:03:07 - The SpeechBrain toolkit

01:16:06 - The Flower framework

01:17:55 - The E-SSL project: Efficient Self-Supervised Learning for Inclusive and Innovative Speech Technologies

01:22:51 - Titouan answer's Florian Eyben's question

01:24:41 - Titouan's question for the next guest

01:25:49 - Outro

Florian Eyben spearheads technology and innovation at audEERING, focusing on developing industry-leading products for speech emotion recognition and deep learning-based audio analysis. He earned my PhD in Computational Paralinguistics from TUM in Munich, Germany. He also specialize in deep learning, audio feature extraction, signal processing, project management, and tech innovation. He is the lead author of the openSMILE toolkit and a co-author of the GPU-accelerated LSTM-RNN training toolkit, CuRRENNT.

In this podcast episode, Florian shares his academic and professional journey, gives insights about openSMILE and of course shares how audEERING was founded.

Enjoy !!

Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi

Editors: Janice Huang and Pascal Hecker

Chapters:

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:26 Welcoming Florian Eyben
00:00:55 Florian's background and research journey
00:10:46 More about openSMILE
00:22:37 Founding audEERING and what it is
00:35:10 For young researchers
00:50:30 Encouragement from Florian
01:00:50 Fun questions
01:17:37 Outro

Meet Rob van Son, Senior researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute Amsterdam who shares his interests and his impressions on Interspeech 2024 in Kos.

Host: Zhengjun Yue

Meet Shrikanth Narayanan who is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering shares his research interests and his impressions on Interspeech 2024 in Kos.

Host: Orchid Chetia Phukan