INTERSPEECH 2018 will be held during September 2-6, 2018 in Hyderabad the capital city (population of about 8 million) of Telangana state in india. The venue is the Hyderabad, international Convention Centre (HICC), a state-of-the-art convention centre for holding large (over 5000 delegates) conferences, and it compares with the best in the world in terms of technological, communication and audio-visual tools. The attached Novotel Hyderabad convention centre is a modern 4-star hotel with 287 guest rooms. The surrounding High Tech City area has several options for transport, accommodation, food, shopping and entertainment within 7 Kilometres distance from the HICC. There are many historic places to visit in Hyderabad, and for shoppers, the city offers everthing from antiques to handicrafts to jewellery, and from dresses to leather goods. The HICC is about 40 minutes drive from the Rajiv Gandhi International airport (RIGA), which is rated as among the best in the world for Airport Service Quality. The airport provides domestic flight connections to enable travellers to reach almost any major city in India within about two hours.

India is a country (population of over 1.25 billion people) with large diversity in language, culture, food habit, etc, but unified as a single nation. This makes communication among people, especially in spoken form, very unique and challenging for scientific exploration. With a huge market in the country and large penetration of mobile communication (with over 800 million mobile phones) for doing business, the IT-enabled services are really facing the challenge of dealing with casual conversations in multiple languages. In fact, the large speech research community in india is already addressing these issues with generous support from the federal and state governments, and from industry. The theme of the conference is not only topical but also apt, “Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies”.

The Organizers expect that the participants of this conference from around the world will get a first hand feel of these unique challenges of providing IT-enabled services to a large population in a multilingual society like India. The organizers of INTERSPEECH 2018 are looking forward to a large participation from around the world, as well as from india, to this once in a life time opportunity of exploiting the challenges facing the scientific community in dealing with spoken form of communication in all its aspects.

Please mark your calendars and save 2-6 September 2018 for INTERSPEECH 2018 in Hyderabad, India. We are eagerly looking forward to welcoming you here in Hyderabad.