CALL FOR SPECIAL INDUSTRY SESSION AND ROUND TABLE

“From Research to Sustainable Business: Operationalizing Speech and Language Technologies in the Age of AI”

Explore the opportunity to showcase your company’s journey in the realm of speech and language technologies at Iberspeech 2026. We invite participants to submit their work in the form of papers, posters, or any format that best represents their experience. Focus on real-world applications and the evolution of AI solutions, addressing key challenges in integration and maintenance. Join us in a roundtable discussion and share your insights with industry leaders.

Motivation

Speech and language technologies have shifted from research outputs and early-stage startups to AI-driven products embedded in real-world applications. The challenge is no longer creating a company or launching a first product—organizations must continuously integrate, adapt, and maintain AI models as a central component of their business. This session explores how research-based companies evolve into mature organizations capable of sustaining AI in their day-to-day operations.

From Research to Sustainable Business:
Operationalizing Speech and Language Technologies in the Age of AI

IberSPEECH 2026, Madrid, Spain | 18-20 November 2026

IberSPEECH 2026 invites companies originating from research in speech and language processing to share their experiences transforming scientific advances into sustainable, AI-driven business operations. As speech technologies shift from research outputs to real-world applications, organizations face the challenge of continuously integrating and maintaining AI models as central business components.

Topics of Interest

1 From Research to Product

How did your research evolve into a product or service? What parts of the original research translated well—and what required significant rethinking?

2 AI as Core Business Infrastructure

How central are AI models to your company’s value proposition? What happens when models fail, degrade, or become outdated?

3 From Prototype to Reliable System

What were the main challenges in moving from research prototypes to robust, production-ready systems? What trade-offs were necessary between

4 Continuous Model Adaptation

How do you manage model lifecycle in practice? How do you handle model updates, domain adaptation, multilingual requirements, or changing user behavior?

5Integration into Business Processes

How are AI systems integrated into your company’s internal workflows and products? What organizational changes were needed to support AI-driven.

6 Human Expertise vs Automation

What is the role of human experts (linguists, annotators, engineers) in maintaining and improving systems? How has this balance evolved with newer AI?

7 Data Strategy and Governance

How do you collect, curate, and manage data over time? How do privacy, ownership, and regulation constraints shape your approach?

8 Scalability and Cost

How do infrastructure and computational costs impact your business decisions? How do you balance innovation with sustainability?

9Trust, Quality, and User Expectations

How do you ensure consistent quality in systems that are probabilistic by nature? How do users react to errors or variability in AI outputs?

10Competition and Technological Disruption

How has the emergence of large-scale AI models and external providers affected your strategy? How do research-based companies remain competitive?

11Lessons Learned

What were the biggest surprises when turning research into a long-term business? What challenges remain unsolved?

12Advice

What advice would you give to researchers aiming to transfer their work into sustainable AI-based products and companies?

Special Industry Session Participation Format

Participants are invited to contribute by submitting a presentation or poster in any preferred format to present their company’s experience, structured around the questions outlined above. Authors are not required to address every step and may choose the aspects most relevant to their experience. Contributions should focus on real business cases or operational journeys, highlighting how speech and language technologies have evolved from research into deployed AI solutions, as well as the challenges of integration, maintenance, and ongoing use.

In addition to the submission, participants are requested to complete the Industrial Innovation and Roundtable Session template, indicating the preferred participation format(s) (e.g., demo, poster, stand, or show-and-tell). Multiple participation formats may be selected. 

IMPORTANT: DO NOT FORGET TO MARK THE Industrial Innovation Session: "From Research to Sustainable Business Operationalizing Speech and Language Technologies in the Age of AI” OPTION WHEN MAKING YOUR SUBMISSION!!!

Round Table Participation

Tell us whether you want to enroll in this table. You will have an initial time to present yourself and your visión and then the chairperson will set some questions/topics to the table for them to discuss. Also, we will reserve space for audience questions.

Interested participants are also requested to complete the Industrial Innovation and Roundtable Session template, indicating the round table option.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT FORGET TO MARK THE Round Table Session: “Speech and Language Technologies in the Age of AI” OPTION WHEN MAKING YOUR SUBMISSION!!!

Make your submission

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