Abstract: A new approach to speech recognition that reacts to concepts conveyed through speech, which shifts the balance of power in speech recognition from straight sound recognition and statistical models to a more powerful and complete approach determining and addressing conveyed concepts. A probabilistically unbiased multi-phoneme recognition process is employed, followed by a phoneme stream analysis process that builds the list of candidate words derived from recognized phonemes, followed by a permutation analysis process that produces sequences of candidate words with high potential of being syntactically valid, and finally, by processing targeted syntactic sequences in a conceptual analysis process to generate the utterance's conceptual representation that can be used to produce an adequate response.