  On the one hand, speech is a key aspect to people's communication. On the
other, it is widely acknowledged that language proficiency is related to
intelligence. Therefore, intelligent robots should be able to understand, at
least, people's orders within their application domain. These insights are not
new in RoboCup@Home, but we lack of a long-term plan to evaluate this approach.
In this paper we conduct a brief review of the achievements on automated speech
recognition and natural language understanding in RoboCup@Home. Furthermore, we
discuss main challenges to tackle in spoken human-robot interaction within the
scope of this competition. Finally, we contribute by presenting a pipelined
road map to engender research in the area of natural language understanding
applied to domestic service robotics.
