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Whispering is a common type of speech which is not often studied studied with speech technology. Perceptual and physiological studies show us that it is subtly dierent from phonated speech, and is surprisingly able to carry a tremendous amount of information. In this thesis we consider the ques-tion: what makes whispering a good form of communication. We examine the dierences between normal phonated speech and whispered speech, and gauge the ecacy of state of the art speech recognition algorithms on rec-ognizing whisper. A method for building speech recognizers for whispered speech using limited whisper speech data is proposed and evaluated. ii Draft of November 17, 2010 at 13: 35 To friends, family and teachers