This paper surveys the state of the art of speech emotion recognition (SER), and presents an outlook on the trend of future SER technology. First, the survey summarizes and analyzes SER in detail from five perspectives, including emotion representation models, representative emotional speech corpora, emotion-related acoustic features extraction, SER methods and applications. Then, based on the survey, the challenges faced by current SER research are concluded. This paper aims to take a deep insight into the mainstream methods and recent progress in this field, and presents detailed comparison and analysis between these methods.