The aim of speech and language technology is to make communication between humans and humans, and humans and machines more efficient, and to make human work less difficult by providing the technological basis of new, computer-based products and services. Speech and language technology are dynamically growing, interdependent new industries dealing with the processing of written and spoken language. These are exceptionally interdisciplinary fields: they rely on foundations in mathematics, information technology, physics, neurology, linguistics, psychology and electrical engineering, and therefore engaging in them requires high qualifications and extensive investments. Internet searching, machine translation and translation support are based on language technology; so are spell-checking and text mining, to mention only the most widely known applications. For commercial use, speech technology is as yet less developed, but it already enables partly automated call centers, voice dial without training, the reading out of text messages, e-mails and the contents of a monitor; automated searches in audio and video material, medical dictation applications, etc. It is our hope that speech translation from and to Hungarian can also be achieved in the not so distant future.