Speech processing addresses various scientific and technological areas. It includes speech analysis and variable rate coding, in order to store or transmit speech. It also covers speech synthesis, especially from text, speech recognition, including speaker and language identification, and spoken language understanding. This book covers the following topics: how to realize speech production and perception systems, how to synthesize and understand speech using state-of-the-art methods in signal processing, pattern recognition, stochastic modelling computational linguistics and human factor studies.