With the proliferation of pervasive devices and the increase in their processing capabilities, client-side speech processing has been emerging as a viable alternative. The SiMPE workshop series started in 2006 [5] with the goal of enabling speech processing on mobile and embedded devices to meet the challenges of pervasive environments (such as noise) and leveraging the context they offer (such as location). SiMPE 2010, the latest in the series brought together, very successfully, researchers from the speech and the HCI communities. We believe this is the beginning.
SiMPE 2011, the 6th in the series, will continue to explore issues, possibilities, and approaches for enabling speech processing as well as convenient and effective speech and multimodal user interfaces. Over the years, SiMPE has been evolving too, and since last year, one of our major goals has been to increase the participation of speech/multimodal HCI designers, and increase their interactions with speech processing experts.
Multimodality got more attention in SiMPE 2008 than it has received in the previous years. In SiMPE 2007 [4], the focus was on developing regions. Given the importance of speech in developing regions, SiMPE 2008 had "SiMPE for developing regions" as a topic of interest. Speech User interaction in cars was a focus area in 2009 [2].