The activities in the field of automatic spoken language processing started after the Second World War with the works on the Vocoder and Voder at Bell Labs by Dudley and colleagues, and were made possible by the availability of electronic devices. Initial research work on basic recognition systems was carried out with very limited computing resources in the fifties of last century. The computer facilities that became available to researchers in the seventies made it possible to achieve initial progress within laboratories. Then microprocessors led to the early commercialization of the first voice recognition and speech synthesis systems at an affordable price. The steady progress in the speed of computers and in the storage capacity accompanied the scientific advances in the field. Although this book focuses on speech recognition but it also covers a brief introduction of the principles of speech production, followed by a broad overview of the methods for analyzing speech.