Throughout the history of digital communication, the digital speech coder is used as speech compression tool. Nowadays, the speech coder has been rapidly developed in the area of mobile communication system to overcome severe channel error and limitation of radio frequency resources. Due to the development of high performance communication system, high quality of speech coder is needed. This kind of speech coder can be used not only in communication services but also in digital multimedia services. In this paper, we describe the technologies of digital speech coder which are used in wire and wireless communication. We also present a summary of recent speech coding standards for narrowband and wideband applications. Finally we introduce the technical trends of next generation speech coder.