The book provides a solid introduction to all aspects of speech communication, including human-human communication (production, hearing and perception), physical aspects of spoken language (speech analysis), speech coding and enhancement for efficient storage and transmission, as well as speech recognition and synthesis, and speaker recognition. Each chapter explains the basic principles and is suitable for readers with some background in signal processing, computer science or phonetics. However, beyond the basic principles, the book contains an extensive survey of the state of the art in the different areas and can serve as an up-to-date reference book for many areas of speech communication, and often also provides a brief discussion of new and controversial research areas. Each chapter contains a comprehensive lists of references, and the book provides pointers to web resources in all areas of speech processing.