Patent US 6,236,964

A speech recognition method and apparatus in which a speech section is sliced by the unit of a word by spotting and candidate words are selected. Next, in a second stage, matching is conducted by the unit of a phoneme. Consequently, selection of the candidate words and slicing of the speech section can be performed concurrently. Furthermore, narrowing of the candidate words is facilitated. Furthermore, since reference phoneme patterns under a plurality of environments are prepared, recognition of an input speech under a larger number of conditions is possible using a smaller amount of data when compared with the case in which reference word patterns under a plurality of environments are prepared.