Designed for attendees new to speech technology, this tutorial provides an overview of today’s key speech technologies. What are the major types of speech recognition engines and how do they work? What is the difference between statistical language models and grammars? Do speaker identification and verification really work? How do speech synthesis engines work and how do you specify synthetic voice characteristics? What does a dialogue engine do and how do you manage a user-computer dialogue? What makes intelligent agents intelligent? What are the dimensions of natural language? What’s needed to build a personal assistant? How will speech technologies change our lives in the next 3 years?