This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.