SPEECH RECOGNIZER HAVING A SPEECH DATA MEMORY STORING SPEECH DATA AND A REFERENCE PATTERN MEMORY STORING PARTIAL SYMBOL TRAINS OF WORDS FOR RECOGNITION

A speech recognizer includes a feature extracting unit for analyzing an input speech to extract a feature vector of the input speech. A speech data memory stores speech data and symbol trains of the input speech. A reference pattern memory stores sets each of a given partial symbol train of a word presented for recognition and an index of speech data with the expression thereof containing the partial symbol train in the speech data memory. A distance calculating unit reads out speech data corresponding to a partial symbol train stored in the reference pattern memory from the speech data memory, and calculates a distance between the partial symbol train read out from the reference pattern memory and a particular section of the input speech. A pattern matching unit derives, with respect to each word presented for recognition, a division of the subject word interval which minimizes the sum of distances of the input speech sections over an entire word interval. A recognition result calculating unit outputs, as a recognition result, a word presented for recognition, which gives the minimum one of the distances between the input speech data output of the pattern matching unit and all the words presented for recognition.