Prior art speech recognition systems suffer the disadvantage that the speech to be recognized must be compared against all entries in the vocabulary to find a closest match, causing the system to operate slowly. In the present system, as each word is spoken during an initialization or training phase, it is digitized (12) and time compressed (14) to form a score (16) which corresponds directly to an address in memory (18) which stores a pointer to the words location in a vocabulary memory (20). During a later voice recognition phase, any word spoken is scored and the word is read from the indirectly addressed vocabulary memory (20) without the necessity of comparisons with the data stored in each memory location.
VOICE RECOGNITION PROCESS UTILIZING CONTENT ADDRESSABLE MEMORY