A comprehensive reference on the exciting growth area of spoken dialogs with computers, this text describes the components of a computer-based spoken dialog system, and will prove invaluable to researchers in industry and academia working on speech communication systems and for applications developers. This state-of-the-art book reviews the complete chain from microphone to speech synthesis. It provides methods, models, and algorithms for building a working system. Renato De Mori is coauthor of each chapter ensuring coherence and homogeneity throughout the text. Spoken Dialogs with Computers covers in detail: transducers and microphone arrays, speech analysis and transformation, acoustic modeling and model training, language modeling, and knowledge integration for automatic speech recognition (ASR). The book also presents generation of word hypotheses, speaker adaptation, robustness and telephone application, use of syntactic and semantic knowledge, speech interpretation and dialog strategies, speech generation, and software system architectures for practical implementation.