---
id: bird26_interspeech
title: Speech Technology and Linguistic Diversity
authors:
  - Steven Bird
year: 2026
isca_url: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/bird26_interspeech.html
pdf_url: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/bird26_interspeech.pdf
session: "Keynote2 - Steven Bird: Speech Technology and Linguistic Diversity"
topics:
  - low-resource
  - multilingual
category: asr
labels:
  - low-resource
  - multilingual
institutions:
  - Charles Darwin University
code:
  url: ""
  license: ""
open_to_collaboration: false
wiki_frontmatter:
  id: bird26_interspeech
  category: asr
  labels:
    - low-resource
    - multilingual
  institutions:
    - Charles Darwin University
  updated: 2026-09-28
  confidence: abstract-only
  source: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/bird26_interspeech.html
wiki_url: https://interspeech-2026-wiki.vercel.app/papers/bird26_interspeech/
markdown_url: https://interspeech-2026-wiki.vercel.app/papers/bird26_interspeech/markdown.md
---

# Speech Technology and Linguistic Diversity

**Category:** `asr` · **Labels:** `low-resource`, `multilingual`

**TL;DR** — A keynote-style talk arguing that speech technology should be redesigned around locally meaningful uses of vernacular languages rather than around maximizing training data.

## Problem

Thousands of local, undocumented vernaculars — illustrated by Australian Indigenous languages such as Kunwinjku — are poorly served by data-hungry speech technology paradigms.

## Method

The talk contrasts two efficiency-driven responses to linguistic diversity (doing more with less data, or automatically collecting more data with less human effort) and instead asks what technology design looks like if that efficiency impulse is set aside, drawing on collaborations with Australian Indigenous speech communities.

## Results

As a talk rather than an experimental paper, it offers a design perspective and community case studies rather than quantitative results.

## Code

None released (as of this page's `updated` date). If you are an author with a repo, please claim this entry — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

## Applications

Guides community-centered speech technology design for low-resource and Indigenous language communities.

## Institutions / 機構

Charles Darwin University

## Related

- [Decolonizing Linguistic Policies in Automatic Speech Recognition: A Framework for Cross-Culturally Competent Speech AI](cunningham26_interspeech.md) — same problem · relatedness 2.2/3
- [Easper: An Accessible ASR Pipeline for Language Documentation](mahmudi26_interspeech.md) — same problem · relatedness 2.0/3
- [‘I have to talk proper white ways’: Australian Aboriginal English Speakers’ Experiences with Voice Technologies](louro26_interspeech.md) — same problem · relatedness 2.0/3
- [GLAD-CSpeech: A Dialectologically Comprehensive Benchmark for Genuine Chinese Dialect Speech](xu26j_interspeech.md) — same problem · relatedness 1.9/3
- [Indigenising Speech Technology: Building a TTS Model for te Reo Māori](leoni26_interspeech.md) — same problem · relatedness 1.9/3

<sub>All 950k paper pairs scored by TypeSafe Jev (`scripts/related/`); relatedness 0 = unrelated … 3 = directly comparable.</sub>