Book excerpt: This book on Robust Speech Recognition and Understanding brings together many different aspects of the current research on automatic speech recognition and language understanding. The first four chapters address the task of voice activity detection which is considered an important issue for all speech recognition systems. The next chapters give several extensions to state-of-the-art HMM methods. Furthermore, a number of chapters particularly address the task of robust ASR under noisy conditions. Two chapters on the automatic recognition of a speaker's emotional state highlight the importance of natural speech understanding and interpretation in voice-driven systems. The last chapters of the book address the application of conversational systems on robots, as well as the autonomous acquisition of vocalization skills.