Abstract: Present-day limitations of the conventional touch-tone keypad are overcome permitting alphabetic information to be entered into a distant computer. The caller speaks a speech portion into a telephone handset, and then types out the speech portion on the touch-tone keypad. The computer receiving the call converts the spoken voice information into a form suitable for additional digital processing, as by extracting speech-recognition features from the spoken information. The computer processes the typed numeric string into a list of all the possible combinations of characters it could represent. The extent of correlation between the features of the spoken speech portion and each of the combinations is determined, and the combination having the highest correlation is taken to be the speech portion entered by the user.