“Handling emotions in human–computer dialogues”, written by Pittermann, Pittermann and Minker, is a complete and interesting book about affective computing in spoken dialogue systems. Dialogue systems are an integrated part of our daily life. They generally mean simplicity, time saving and safety. For example, when driving, hand-free operations are necessary and therefore the possibility of giving commands through speech is a necessity. However, to implement more flexible dialogue systems, it is important that these systems can adapt to the speaker. In particular, it seems very important that dialogue systems should be able to recognize and cope with our emotions. To human, the emotions recognition process occurs in an automatic, unconscious, and effortless fashion. Emotions explicitly affect our autonomic nervous system (e.g., cardiovascular and skin conductance changes) and our somatic nervous system (motor expression in face, voice and body). We usually don’t have many...