Interspeech 2026 is the 27th Interspeech, and it runs 28 September – 1 October 2026 at ICC Sydney, in Sydney, Australia. Not the 37th — that is the most common mix-up, and it comes from confusing Interspeech's own count with the much older ICASSP. The paper deadline closed on 25 February 2026. Registration is open.
This page is the practical version: what is on, where, what it costs you in time, and what to do if you are not going. Last updated 23 September 2026.
The essentials
| Edition | 27th Interspeech |
|---|---|
| Dates | 28 September – 1 October 2026 |
| Venue | ICC Sydney, Sydney, Australia |
| Theme | “Speaking Together” |
| Organiser | ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) |
| Paper deadline | Closed — 25 February 2026 |
| Registration | Open, with student and ISCA-member rates |
| Next edition | Interspeech 2027, São Paulo, Brazil |
You have missed 2026. The next one is Interspeech 2027 in São Paulo: papers due 9 February 2027, with updates accepted to 16 February 2027, notification 2 June 2027, camera-ready 9 June 2027. Put those in your calendar now rather than in January.
What is actually on
The programme is the standard Interspeech shape, which is worth knowing if this is your first one because the poster sessions are where the conference actually happens:
- Keynotes — plenary, and the one part everyone attends.
- Oral and poster sessions — the bulk of the technical programme. Posters are heavily attended at Interspeech in a way they are not at every venue; if your paper is a poster, that is not a consolation prize.
- Tutorials — usually the day before the main programme, and usually the best value per hour if you are new to a subfield.
- Special Sessions and Challenges — focused tracks, often where the interesting disagreements are.
- Show & Tell — live demos. The most useful session for anyone evaluating what is actually deployable versus what is a plot in a paper.
- Satellite events — separate workshops attached to the main conference, with their own registration. Check these before you book flights, because they move your arrival date.
- Receptions and the Conference Dinner — ticketed separately in most years. If you are job-hunting, this is the part of the week that matters most.
The conference chairs for 2026 are Beena Ahmed, Felicity Cox, Helen Meng, Michael Proctor and Vidhyasaharan Sethu. The official programme search on the conference site lets you filter by topic, author, institution or keyword, which is the only sane way to plan four days of parallel tracks.
Is it worth going?
Honest answer: it depends entirely on why you are going, and Sydney is a long way from most of the field's population centres.
Worth it if you are presenting, you are hiring, you are job-hunting at the research level, or you work in a subfield small enough that the ten people who matter will all be in one room. Interspeech is the largest peer-reviewed venue specifically for speech and spoken language processing, so the density of relevant people is higher than at a general ML conference.
Harder to justify if you are an industry engineer who wants to keep up with the literature. The proceedings are open access and the talks are increasingly recorded. You can get most of the information for free, and what you cannot get remotely is the corridor conversation — which is real, but is a travel-budget question, not an information question.
How Interspeech compares to ICASSP
The two flagship venues get conflated constantly, so briefly:
| Interspeech | ICASSP | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | ISCA | IEEE Signal Processing Society |
| Scope | Speech and spoken language only | All of signal processing; speech is one track |
| Paper style | Shorter, often more linguistic and exploratory | Shorter, more signal-processing and engineering |
| Reviewing | Single round, no rebuttal in most years | Single round, no rebuttal |
| Next edition | 2027, São Paulo, 29 Aug – 2 Sep | 2027, Toronto, 16–21 May |
Both are well regarded in speech. Neither is “tier 1” in the sense that NeurIPS or ICML are treated as tier 1 by the broader ML community, and both have acceptance rates that sit far above the single-digit rates of the headline ML conferences. That is a difference in culture, not in quality — speech venues have historically optimised for circulating work rather than for prestige scarcity. We cover the submission side in the ICASSP 2027 deadline and acceptance-rate guide.
Interspeech 2027, and planning further out
Interspeech 2027 is in São Paulo, Brazil, 29 August – 2 September 2027. Papers are due 9 February 2027. If you are planning a submission, the useful thing to know is that the Interspeech cycle gives you roughly six months between deadline and conference, so work you start now is realistically 2027 work.
For the rest of the 2026 and 2027 calendar — SLT, Odyssey, ASRU and the speech tracks at the general ML conferences — see our full speech conference calendar. And if you are looking for ASRU specifically, there is no 2026 edition; it is biennial and runs in odd years.
Bottom line
Interspeech 2026 is the 27th edition, 28 September to 1 October, at ICC Sydney. Submissions closed in February. If you are going, book satellite events before flights and treat the poster sessions and the dinner as the real programme. If you are not going, the proceedings are open access and Interspeech 2027 in São Paulo has a 9 February 2027 deadline.