Abstract: Improved speaker independent speech recognition system and method are disclosed in which an utterance by an unspecified person into an electrical signal is input through a device such as a telephone, the electrical signal from the input telephone converting the electrical signal into a time series of characteristic multidimensional vectors, the time series of characteristic multidimensional vectors are received, each of the vectors being converted into a plurality of candidates so that the plurality of phonemes constitutes a plurality of strings of phonemes in time series as a plurality of candidates, the plurality of candidates of phonemes are compared simultaneously (one at a time) with a reference pattern of a reference string of phonemes for each word previously stored in a dictionary to determine which string of phonemes derived from the phoneme recognition means has a highest similarity to one of the reference strings of the phonemes for the respective words stored in the dictionary using a predetermine