The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a survey on activities in spontaneous speech recognition in Europe over the past 10 years. A brief historical review on the development of this topic in Europe is presented first, and then a few technical issues are addressed, that distinguish research projects on spontaneous speech recognition from other research activities in speech. Some of the major projects that have been carried out in the last years are then briefly presented and finally, the paper concludes with an outlook on the future of research in spontaneous speech recognition in Europe.