Voices Across Crises
Stakeholder Perspectives and Opportunities for AI Speech Technologies
About the Workshop
Effective communication is critical for public safety during crises, particularly for vulnerable communities facing barriers to accessing timely information. Emergency responders, humanitarian organizations, and affected populations rely on rapid information exchange across several key functions: situational awareness, information management, needs assessment and coordination, risk communication and early warning, and recovery and long-term monitoring.
Crisis communication often happens through spoken channels such as emergency hotlines, radio, and voice messaging apps. These channels are inherently multilingual and speech-based, creating significant barriers for vulnerable communities and responders alike. Recent advances in AI (automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and multilingual large language models) have opened new opportunities. However, these technologies are often developed without a thorough understanding of operational realities.
This workshop explores how voice technologies and AI tools could support communication and information sharing during emergencies, with a focus on vulnerable and linguistically diverse communities. We draw on ongoing surveys and interviews with crisis communication stakeholders (government representatives, radio and streaming organizations, humanitarian NGOs, and community leaders) to ground the discussion in real-world experiences.
Participants will reflect on findings, share their own perspectives, and identify key communication challenges. Small group activities will map communication practices across the crisis ecosystem and explore potential applications of speech and voice technologies across use cases such as situational awareness, early warning, and needs coordination, including associated risks and limitations.
Who Should Attend
Crisis management researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and technology researchers. No prior NLP or AI expertise required; the workshop is designed to be accessible to all ISCRAM attendees.
