The fourth edition of the Symposium on Security & Privacy in Speech Communication, focuses on speech and voice through which we express ourselves. As speech communication can be used to command virtual assistants to transport emotion or to identify oneself, the symposium encourages participants to give answers on how we can strengthen security and privacy for speech representation types in user-centric human/machine interaction? The symposium therefore sees that interdisciplinary exchange is in high demand and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines – more specifically: signal processing, cryptography, security, human-computer interaction, law, ethics, and anthropology.

The VoicePrivacy initiative is spearheading the effort to develop privacy preservation solutions for speech technology. It aims to consolidate the newly formed community to develop the task and metrics and to benchmark progress in anonymization solutions using common datasets, protocols, and metrics. VoicePrivacy takes the form of a competitive challenge. In keeping with the previous VoicePrivacy Challenge editions, the current edition focuses on voice anonymization. Participants are required to develop anonymization systems to suppress speaker identity while keeping the content and paralinguistic attributes intact. This edition focuses on preserving the emotional state, which is the key paralinguistic attribute in many real-world applications of voice anonymization. All the participants are encouraged to submit to the SPSC Symposium papers related to their challenge entry, as well as other scientific papers related to speaker anonymization and voice privacy. More details can be found on the VoicePrivacy Challenge webpage: https://www.voiceprivacychallenge.org/.

For the general symposium, we welcome contributions to related topics, as well as progress reports, project dissemination, or theoretical discussions and “work in progress”. In addition, guests from academia, industry and public institutions as well as interested students are welcome to attend the conference without having to make their own contribution.

Although, we aim for meeting all of you on-site, we also opt for virtual presentations during the symposium.