The NII speech group led by Prof. Junichi Yamagishi was formed in 2013. It has close relationships with industry. The speech group is also responsible for distributing various Japanese speech corpora to Japanese universities for improving research infrastructure. The group works closely with NII’s biometrics/security group led by Prof. Isao Echizen on media cloning.

The group also co-initiated Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenges and Voice Conversion Challenges.