The 26th International Conference “Speech and Computer” SPECOM-2024 was held on November 25-28, 2024 in Belgrade, Serbia. The conference was jointly organized by the University of Novi Sad, University of Belgrade and Telecommunication Society of Serbia in partnership with the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPC RAS). The conference was chaired by Prof. Vlado Delic, University of Novi Sad, and Dr. Alexey Karpov, chief scientist at SPC RAS.

SPECOM is a prestigious international conference, which was founded by SPIIRAS (a separate structural subdivision of SPC RAS since 2020) in 1996. The first SPECOM conference was held in October 1996 in St. Petersburg. The conference annually gathers scientists and engineers in the field of speech technologies, including automatic speech recognition and understanding, speech-to-text synthesis, speaker and language identification, digital audio signal processing, natural language processing, text analysis, computer paralinguistics, multimodal information processing, human-machine interaction, etc.

The SPECOM-2024 conference was attended by about 70 participants in person in Belgrade (mainly from European countries and Russia), including 12 scientists from Russia, and more than 50 participants remotely via teleconference (from around the world), representing more than 20 different countries. During the conference, 9 English-language oral and poster sessions on the main conference topics were held, at which 53 papers were presented, including 18 papers from Russia. Also within the framework of the conference 2 plenary reports were made by leading scientists from Germany and Serbia. The proceedings of SPECOM-2024 were published by the beginning of the conference by the scientific publishing house Springer Nature in 2 volumes in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) book series, which is indexed in Scopus (Q2).

SPECOM-2024 was organized jointly and in parallel with 32nd Telecommunications Forum TELFOR-2024, which gathered several hundred participants in Belgrade.