Abstract: In a speech recognition system disclosed herein, acoustic speech waveforms are initially analyzed to obtain, at successive sample times, digital frames of speech information. This initial analysis may, for example, be performed by multi-channel filtering or linear predictive encoding. Stored in the apparatus is a list of representative standard frames, represented by coded indices, together with a table of difference values which represent the vector distances between each standard frame in the list and all other standard frames. For each token (vocabulary) word which is to be recognized, there is stored a sequence of standard frame indices which represent that token word. As each sample frame is generated, a representative standard frame is selected which best represents the sample frame.