Call for Participation: Interspeech Speech & Intelligence Competition

Call for Participation: Interspeech Speech & Intelligence Competition

Interspeech 2009 in Brighton, UK will be playing host to the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence on September 6th. Building upon this tradition the Interspeech Speech & Intelligence Competition will pit systems against each other to see which is most capable of imitating a human conversation through the audio channel.

In keeping with the theme of ‘Speech and Intelligence’ the systems will be asked to complete a simple, direct and urgent scenario within an artificial setting. In order to usefully advance the current state of the art the challenge will be limited, requiring only an urgent focus on the task at hand. However, we anticipate that successful systems will posses some of the following features:

• An understanding of and ability to convey basic emotions
• A simple model of the judges current cognitive and emotional state
• Simple domain knowledge, appropriate to the current scenario
• A reasonable TTS system
• An ability to comprehend simple speech with little training

This will enable researchers to use the competition to address current, pressing, research challenges. To add further interest, children from local schools will be asked to judge each entrant (ensuring natural, unpredictable conversation within the scope of the scenario) and the systems themselves will be competing against local actors playing a role within the scenario. It promises to be a lot of fun!