Free Registration & $20K Prize Pool: 2nd MLC-SLM Challenge 2026 on Multilingual Speech LLMs [N]

Hi everyone,

The 2nd Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Models Challenge 2026 is now open for registration.

This year’s challenge focuses on Speech LLMs for real-world multilingual conversational speech, covering speaker diarization, speech recognition, acoustic understanding, and semantic understanding.

Top-performing teams will share a total prize pool of USD 20,000. Registration is free, and the dataset will be provided free of charge to registered participants.

Participants will work with a multilingual conversational speech dataset of around 2,100 hours, covering 14 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Urdu, Turkish, and more. The dataset also includes regional accents such as Canadian French, Mexican Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

The challenge includes two tracks:

Task 1: Multilingual conversational speech diarization and recognition
Task 2: Multilingual conversational speech understanding through multiple-choice questions

Both academic and industry teams are welcome, and individual researchers are also encouraged to participate.

Registration Link: https://forms.gle/jfAZ95abGy4ZiNHo7

Questions: [mlc-slmw@nexdata.ai]()

Would be great to see more people working on Speech LLMs, multilingual ASR, diarization, and conversational understanding join this year’s challenge.