Speech recognition accuracy is significantly enhanced by employing recognition criteria that involve comparison (in blocks 74, 84), as between spoken command words and stored 'training' words, of both time-dependent feature arrays (72,73) and time-independent feature vectors (82, 83). The novel time-independent feature vector for any given word consists of a representation of the frequency of occurrence of each particular feature at any of several 'time slots' in the word. The extra information about the word gained by a comparison (84) of its vector with a corresponding vector of each training word assists in the final decision (90). 
SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM AND METHOD