Speech signal processing refers to the acquisition, manipulation, storage, transfer and output of human utterances by a computer. The main goals are the recognition, synthesis and compression of human speech:

• Speech recognition (also called voice recognition) focuses on capturing the human voice as a digital sound wave and converting it into a computer-readable format.

• Speech synthesis is the reverse process of speech recognition. Advances in this area improve the computers' usability for the visually impaired.

• Speech compression is important in the telecommunications area for increasing the amount of info which can be transferred, stored, or heard, for a given set of time and space constraints.

Signal processing.