The second, and international, iteration of the WTF workshop will be held as part of the CUI conference in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on the 19th of July. 

Speech interfaces are commonplace in many types of robots and robotic applications. Despite the progress in speech recognition and many other areas of natural language processing in recent years, failures of speech interfaces in robotic scenarios are numerous and commonplace. In contrast to the common experience of failure of speech interfaces in robotics, the literature is positively skewed towards the success and good performance of these. The documentation of failure in speech interfaces on the other hand is exceedingly rare and a systematic study of failure and its causes is non-existent. 

The WTF workshop would like to address this gap by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of researchers from fields such as robotics, human-robot Interaction (HRI), human-computer interaction (HCI), natural language processing, conversation analysis, and pragmatics. The central idea of the workshop is to discuss the multitude of failures of speech interfaces openly and, if possible, systematically, in the hope of identifying the most fruitful directions for overcoming these failures in future systems. The envisioned types of failures may range from failures of speech recognition to pragmatic failures and infelicities.

The workshop will focus on human-robot joint action scenarios involving multimodal coordination between humans and robots as these are the norm in scenarios where robotic speech interfaces are deployed. However, insights of the HCI community that link up with the multimodal nature of communication are very much welcome as we expect there to be a considerable overlap.