There is no ASRU 2026. The IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop runs every two years, in odd-numbered years. The last one, ASRU 2025, took place December 6–10, 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The next is ASRU 2027 (location to be announced). The even-year counterpart is the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop — SLT 2026 — in Palermo, Italy, December 13–16, 2026. The other major speech venue this year is Interspeech 2026 in Sydney, Australia (September 28 – October 1). ICASSP 2026 already happened, in Barcelona in May.
Why there's no ASRU 2026
ASRU and SLT are the two speech workshops run by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and they alternate:
- ASRU — odd years (…2021, 2023, 2025, 2027…)
- SLT — even years (…2022, 2024, 2026…)
Both are single-track, a few hundred attendees, three to four days, with heavy industry presence. ASRU leans toward recognition and understanding; SLT leans toward spoken language understanding, dialogue, and applications — but the overlap is large and growing as speech LLMs blur the line. If you were planning around "ASRU 2026," SLT 2026 is the event you want.
ASRU is biennial (odd years). No ASRU 2026; ASRU 2027 is next. For 2026, attend SLT 2026 (Palermo, Dec 13–16) and/or Interspeech 2026 (Sydney, Sept 28 – Oct 1).
SLT 2026 — the de facto "ASRU 2026"
- Dates: December 13–16, 2026
- Location: Palermo, Sicily, Italy
- Official site: attend.ieee.org/slt-2026
- Paper submission: closed — the regular deadline was extended to June 24, 2026.
- Challenge proposals: closed (March 11, 2026).
- Notification, camera-ready, author / early registration: listed on the official Important Dates page — check it, since acceptance notices typically land in late September and camera-ready and registration deadlines follow in October–November.
Scope covers ASR, TTS, speech translation, spoken dialogue, speech-language models and spoken language understanding, plus a strong challenges track. If you don't have a paper, you can still attend — general registration usually opens a couple of months out. It's a compact venue and a good place to meet the teams building production speech systems.
The 2026 speech-conference calendar
| Conference | Dates | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICASSP 2026 | May 4–8, 2026 | Barcelona, Spain | Past |
| Interspeech 2026 | Sept 28 – Oct 1, 2026 | Sydney, Australia | Upcoming — the year's biggest speech venue |
| SLT 2026 | Dec 13–16, 2026 | Palermo, Italy | Upcoming — the even-year IEEE workshop |
Also in the mix: Odyssey (speaker and language recognition, biennial), IWSLT (spoken language translation), the JSALT summer workshop, and audio/speech tracks at NeurIPS and ICML. For the full list with deadlines, see our speech tech conferences guide.
Looking for ASRU 2025?
It ran December 6–10, 2025 in Honolulu. Accepted papers are in IEEE Xplore under the ASRU 2025 proceedings, and many authors also post preprints on arXiv. Program themes that dominated: speech LLMs, long-form and streaming ASR, low-resource languages, and speech-to-speech translation.
Why this matters if you're job-hunting in speech AI
ASRU, SLT and Interspeech are where speech-AI hiring happens in person. Companies from Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta down to Deepgram, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs and Cartesia send teams, run recruiting booths, and sponsor student events. A paper gets you approached directly; without one, the hallway track and the challenge sessions are still the fastest way to meet hiring managers in the field.
For 2026, the two to target are Interspeech 2026 (Sydney) and SLT 2026 (Palermo). If travel isn't an option, both usually offer virtual registration, and accepted papers plus recorded talks appear online within a few weeks.
Bottom line
No ASRU in 2026 — it's back in 2027. For this year, SLT 2026 in Palermo (December) is the direct equivalent, and Interspeech 2026 in Sydney (late September) is the larger event. Plan around those.