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As automatic emotion recognition based on speech matures, new challenges can be faced. We therefore address the major aspects in view of potential applications in the field, to benchmark today's emotion recognition systems and bridge the gap between commercial interest and current performances: acted vs. spontaneous speech, realistic emotions, noise and microphone conditions, and speaker independence. Three different data-sets are used: the Berlin Emotional Speech Database, the Danish Emotional Speech Database, and the spontaneous AIBO Emotion Corpus. By using different feature types such as word- or turn-based statistics, manual versus forced alignment, and optimization techniques we show how to best cope with this demanding task and how noise addition or different microphone positions affect emotion recognition.