The overall aim of the book is to provide an integrated view of the separate stages of the speech chain, covering the production process, speech data analysis and speech perception. Analysis of information bearing elements of the speech signal have found applications in linguistic theory and in the knowledge base of speech technology with special reference to speech synthesis.

The book contains 19 selected articles organized in 6 chapters:

• Speech research overview with a historical outline,
• Speech production and synthesis,
• The voice source,
...

This book is based on publications from the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in 2002. The workshop covered various aspects of devel- ment and evaluation of spoken multimodal dialogue systems and components with particular emphasis on mobile environments, and discussed the state-- the-art within this area. On the development side the major aspects addressed include speech recognition, dialogue management, multimodal output gene- tion, system architectures, full applications, and user interface issues. On the...

At the beginning we would like to introduce a refinement. The term 'VLSI planarization' means planarization of a circuit of VLSI, Le. the embedding of a VLSI circuit in the plane by different criteria such as the minimum number of connectors, the minimum total length of connectors, the minimum number of over-the-element routes, etc. A connector is designed to connect the broken sections of a net. It can be implemented in different ways depending on the technology. Connectors for a bipolar VLSI are implemented by diffused tun nels, for instance. By over-the-element route we shall mean a...