The IEEE Tutorialand ResearchWorkshopon Perceptionand InteractiveTe- nologies for Multimodal Dialogue Systems (PIT 2008) is the continuation of a successful series of workshops that started with an ISCA Tutorial and Research WorkshoponMultimodalDialogueSystemsin1999.Thisworkshopwasfollowed by a second one focusing on mobile dialogue systems (IDS 2002), a third one exploring the role of a?ect in dialogue (ADS 2004), and a fourth one focusing on perceptive interfaces (PIT 2006). Like its predecessors, PIT 2008 took place at Kloster Irsee in Bavaria. Due to the increasing interest in perceptive interfaces, we decided to hold a follow-up workshop on the themes discussed at PIT 2006, but encouraged aboveallpaperswithafocusonperceptioninmultimodaldialoguesystems.PIT 2008received37 paperscoveringthe following topics (1) multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, (2) classi?cation of dialogue acts and sound, (3) recognitionof eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech aswellascombinationsofmodalities, (4) vocal emotion recognition, (5) human-like and social dialogue systems and (6) evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems. Noteworthy was the strong participation from industry at PIT 2008. Indeed, 17 of the accepted 37 papers come from industrial organizations or were written in collaboration with them. Wewouldliketothankallauthorsforthe e?ortthey madewiththeirsubm- sions, and the Program Committee - nearly 50 distinguished researchers from industry and academia - who worked very hard to meet tight deadlines and selected the best contributions for the ?nal program. Special thanks goes to our invited speaker, Anton Batliner from Friedrich-Alexander-Universit] atErlangen- N] urnberg."

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model-specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?