Book excerpt: After more than two decades of research activity, speech recognition has begun to live up to its promise as a practical technology and interest in the field is growing dramatically. Readings in Speech Recognition provides a collection of seminal papers that have influenced or redirected the field and that illustrate the central insights that have emerged over the years. The editors provide an introduction to the field, its concerns and research problems. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the main schools of thought and design philosophies that have motivated different approaches to speech recognition system design. Each chapter includes an introduction to the papers that highlights the major insights or needs that have motivated an approach to a problem and describes the commonalities and differences of that approach to others in the book.