ESSV (March 3-5, 2021)

The 32th Konferenz Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung (ESSV) was organized by Stefan Hillmann, Benjamin Weiss, Thilo Michael, Sebastian Möller, and their team at Technische Universität Berlin. It took place virtually, of course. We should think about awarding a prize for the most well-designed gatherTown environment - ESSV 2021 would be a strong contender! 🏆

I particularly enjoyed the keynote talks by Elisabeth André (Towards socially interactive agents with explanatory skills) and David Schlangen (All interaction is situated, all language is grounded: implications for the design of spoken dialogue systems).

The Best Student Paper went to Anabell Hacker (TU Berlin) for her work Alexa, who are you? – Analysing Alexa’s, Cortana’s and Siri’s vocal personality. Congrats – great work! 👏

We presented joint work between Saarland University, Saarbrücken and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań on Phonetic convergence evaluation based on fundamental frequency variability.

Foto Selfie during ESSV 2021: next to Telefunken-Hochhaus @ gatherTown