Research has been conducted in the area of voice processing for over six decades but it has only been in the past few years that the impact of the years of research is starting to be seen in modern telecommunications systems. Virtually every area of voice processing, including speech coding, speech synthesis, speech recognition, and even, to a small extent, speaker verification, has left the research laboratory and now appears in a product or service that is in daily use out in the marketplace, often by millions of customers per day. This revolution in voice processing in telecommunications is fueled by algorithmic advances (which improve the quality of the voice processing systems), hardware advances (which provide high processing power and memory at low cost), and networking advances (which provide high bandwidth pipes to the home, office, and throughout the telecommunications network). In this paper we illustrate the impact of voice processing on modern telecommunications by showing the diverse ways in which speech coding, speech synthesis, speech recognition and speaker verification have become embodied in new products and services.