Designed for attendees new to the speech technology arena, this tutorial provides an overview of today’s key speech technologies. What are the major differences between dictation and conversational recognition engines? Should you use statistical language models (SLMs) or speech grammars? Should you use concatenative or parameter-based speech synthesis engines? Do speaker identification and verification really work? Is there a need for touchtone recognition in interactive voice response systems? Who drives the speech dialogue? The user, the computer, or both? Where can natural language processing technologies such as natural language recognition, machine translation, response generation, and summarization be used today? Can speech technologies be embedded in mobile devices, or do they require a backend server? See how speech is being integrated with other modes. Untangle the voice standards alphabet: VoiceXML, SSML, SRGS, CCXML, PLS, and SCXML, and more.