The Third Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009) took place on 23 October 2009 in Beijing China in conjunction with ACM MultiMedia 2009. We had a great set of demos and talks. As an organizer this gives you a warm pleased feeling -- all that work is worth it. Domains covered included broadcast, meetings, interviews, telephone conversations, podcasts and voice tagging for photos. The approaches presented involved using a variety of techniques including subword units, exploiting dialogue structure, fusing retrieval models, modeling topics and integrating visual features. Such events serve to highlight the importance of the spoken word in many multimedia access and retrieval applications. And also to remind us how far we are from exploiting it fully.
