The Interspeech 2025 Speech Accessibility Project Challenge

While the last decade has witnessed significant advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, performance of these systems for individuals with speech disabilities remains inadequate, partly due to limited public training data. To bridge this gap, the 2025 Interspeech Speech Accessibility Project (SAP) Challenge was launched, utilizing over 400 hours of SAP data collected and transcribed from more than 500 individuals with diverse speech disabilities. Hosted on EvalAI and leveraging the remote evaluation pipeline, the SAP Challenge evaluates submissions based on Word Error Rate and Semantic Score. Consequently, 12 out of 22 valid teams outperformed the whisper-large-v2 baseline in terms of WER, while 17 teams surpassed the baseline on SemScore. Notably, the top team achieved the lowest WER of 8.11\%, and the highest SemScore of 88.44\% at the same time, setting new benchmarks for future ASR systems in recognizing impaired speech.

IRL Dittos: Embodied Multimodal AI Agent Interactions in Open Spaces

We introduce the In Real Life (IRL) Ditto, an AI-driven embodied agent designed to represent remote colleagues in shared office spaces, creating opportunities for real-time exchanges even in their absence. IRL Ditto offers a unique hybrid experience by allowing in-person colleagues to encounter a digital version of their remote teammates, initiating greetings, updates, or small talk as they might in person. Our research question examines: How can the IRL Ditto influence interactions and relationships among colleagues in a shared office space? Through a four-day study, we assessed IRL Ditto's ability to strengthen social ties by simulating presence and enabling meaningful interactions across different levels of social familiarity. We find that enhancing social relationships depended deeply on the foundation of the relationship participants had with the source of the IRL Ditto. This study provides insights into the role of embodied agents in enriching workplace dynamics for distributed teams.