On October 7-9, 2020, the 22nd International Conference "Speech and Computer" SPECOM-2020 was held at the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, formerly know as SPIIRAS.

The SPECOM series of conferences is dedicated to research and development in the field of computer speech technologies, it was founded by SPIIRAS in St. Petersburg and has been held annually since 1996. The last time in Russia the conference was held in 2011, and in St. Petersburg - in 2009, the last decade SPECOM was organized by SPIIRAN together with foreign partners in Turkey, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Greece, Serbia and the Czech Republic.

In 2020, SPECOM was for the first time held completely online using the Zoom service and open broadcasts on YouTube. Within the framework of SPECOM-2020, the 5th satellite international conference Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2020 was also held. The joint event brought together more than 300 remote participants, in total, 100 scientific reports in English were presented in the form of interactive or video presentations, selected based on the results of rigorous peer review from 160 submitted articles, by authors from 20 countries of the world (the largest number of reports were presented by authors from Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany and France).

The conference was sponsored by Huawei Corporation (general sponsor) and ACM Solutions, the conference was also supported by the International Association for Speech Communication ISCA, the St. Petersburg Convention and Exhibition Bureau and the professional conference organizer Monomax.

Proceedings of the conferences were published by Springer Nature (Switzerland) in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series and indexed by the Scopus (quartile Q2) and Web of Science databases.

In 2020, SPECOM is also included in the International List of TOP Conferences in the Field of Computer Science.

Currently, SPECOM is the first and only international conference with Russian roots included in this list of top conferences, based on the analysis of 5-year publication activity and citation of articles. It was decided to hold the next 23rd International Conference "Speech and Computer" SPECOM-2021 on the basis of the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences on September 27-30, 2021 in St. Petersburg, if possible in a hybrid format.