One of the biggest dates in the calendar at The Forensic Voice Centre is the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics  (IAFPA) conference, and this year we attended the 34^th Annual Conference in Trier, Germany between 26-29^th July 2026. 

Trier welcomed us with a week of warm weather and a programme full of interesting research, casework updates and special sessions. We’d like to thank the organisers who hosted a fantastic academic and social schedule.

We were invited to present our ‘Checking Procedures’ submission as a special session which took form as a roundtable discussion between a panel of five forensic practitioners from different laboratories across the world. This included government and private service providers across Europe, as well as those who work in teams and as sole practitioners. The panellists discussed four main areas relating to how practitioners have their casework independently reviewed which included:

• Current practices: to establish the different approaches to checking across forensic practitioners and organisations across the world and identify areas of common practice and divergence.
• Challenges: to understand the common challenges that practitioners face and find solutions to overcome them.
• Learning & Improvement: to learn about how recurring issues are identified and fed back into training or procedural improvements. ​
• Future directions: to discover what the future might hold for checking procedures.​

It was interesting to hear from international colleagues about how checking and peer review is similar and different to the UK, as well as how sole practitioners navigate the importance of checking in the absence of in-house colleagues. Katherine Earnshaw presented the perspective from the Forensic Voice Centre on the panel, and Bryony Nuttall hosted the session. We’d like to thank the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences for awarding The Forensic Voice Centre a £500 travel grant to attend the conference for this session.

We also presented a poster on the Inter-Laboratory Comparison exercises we are organising in audio enhancement and forensic transcription. The purpose of these exercises is for practitioners to share methods and results, and to discuss best practices for these forensic science activities (FSAs). We hope the findings will assist in demonstrating practitioner competence, method development and method validation as part of our (and others’) Quality Management System(s). This exercise has been organised in collaboration with the University of York’s Department of Language and Linguistic Science who have created a set of forensically realistic recordings with ground truth data that will be used in the exercise. The interlaboratory comparison exercise will run in Autumn 2026, and we hope to present the results at next year’s IAFPA conference. Forensic practitioners who currently carry out casework – and may be interested in similar future exercises – are invited to contact us.

We look forward to seeing our colleagues again next year at the 35^th Annual Conference in our hometown of York! The Forensic Voice Centre team will be co-organising the event with those in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. We look forward to seeing you again then!