*New advances in spoken language processing: theory and practice *In-depth coverage of speech processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding, and speech interface design *Many case studies from state-of-the-art systems, including examples from Microsofts advanced research labs Spoken Language Processing draws on the latest advances and techniques from multiple fields: computer science, electrical engineering, acoustics, linguistics, mathematics, psychology, and beyond. Starting with the fundamentals, it presents all this and more: *Essential background on speech production and perception, probability and information theory, and pattern recognition *Extracting information from the speech signal: useful representations and practical compression solutions *Modern speech recognition techniques: hidden Markov models, acoustic and language modeling, improving resistance to environmental noises, search algorithms, and large vocabulary speech recognition *Text-to-speech: analyzing documents, pitch and duration controls; trainable synthesis, and more *Spoken language understanding: dialog management, spoken language applications, and multimodal interfaces. T