Toward a Real-Time Spoken Language System Using Commercial Hardware 
 
 We describe the methods and hardware that we are using to produce a real-time demonstration of an integrated Spoken Language System . We describe algorithms that greatly reduce the computation needed to compute the N-Best sentence hypotheses . To avoid grammar coverage problems we use a fully-connected first-order statistical class grammar . The speech-search algorithm is implemented on a board with a single Intel i860 chip , which provides a factor of 5 speed-up over a SUN 4 for straight C code . The board plugs directly into the VME bus of the SUN4 , which controls the system and contains the natural language system and application back end .  