Most of the speech communication applications viz. telephony, hands-free communication, voice recording, automatic speech recognition, interactive voice response system, human-machine interfaces, etc. that require at least one microphone, the desired speech signal is usually contaminated by background noise and reverberation. As a result, the speech signal has to be "cleaned" with digital signal processing tools before it is played out, transmitted, or stored. An attempt has been made here to explain the requirements and scope of improvements in the field of speech enhancement and its real-time embedded implementation.