All three Forensic Voice Centre experts attended the 33rd annual conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics conference on 20-23 July 2025 in Den Haag (The Hague) in the Netherlands, at the ‘Wijnhaven’ part of the Campus Den Haag of the University of Leiden. We are grateful to the team at the Netherlands Forensic Institute, the Dutch Immigration and Nautralisation Service and the University of Leiden for hosting the conference.

We were proud to present two papers at the conference:

“Quality Matters” presented by Dr. Richard Rhodes: This talk in the special session on Quality highlighted our approach to developing and validating robust Quality Management processes. We shared recent results from our inter-laboratory comparisons, internal audits and proficiency tests.

“Casework 🎲 Conundrums” – In this interactive session, we explored six real-world challenges in current casework practice. We invited feedback from world-leading practitioners and encouraged them to share their own conundrums.

FVC also had input on a poster about validation of phonetic methods for forensic voice comparison presented by the PASR project team from the University of York.

There were over 110 participants, mostly in person, for this event which included workshops, special sessions, and a wide range of talks: on voice comparison methods (ASR and phonetic), synthetic voices/deepfakes, transcription methods, LADO/LAAP, super-recognisers, cross-language comparisons, audio authentication, teaching practices, quality standards, and more!

We’re already looking forward to IAFPA2026 in Trier, Germany!