ESPERANTO is a collaborative research program based on a partnership between 15 academic and 4 non-academic partners, having complementary expertise and resources. The Esperanto project involves academic institutions leading the field of speech processing on 4 continents for decades and covering a large range of speech processing applications. ESPERANTO will contribute to the development of the next generation of AI; AI interacting with their users for better learning but also explainable systems: systems whose decisions are understandable by humans. In order to make these technologies accessible to the largest number of people, ESPERANTO will address applications with limited resources in the field of rare languages, robotics or education.

Among major events, the ESPERANTO consortium will co-organize JSALT workshops in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University. JSALT workshops consist of 2 weeks of summer school followed by 6 weeks of teamwork on a research topic chosen by the organizers and funded by major American companies. For the second time in 25 years, this key event in the field of Artificial Intelligence will take place outside the American continent and will bring 5 teams of international researchers to Le Mans.