Patent ID: 6961706

Claim:
A speech recognition apparatus comprising: a hierarchical dictionary section stored with a plurality of speech recognition dictionaries having a plurality of reference speech signals with mutual association in a hierarchical fashion; extracting means for extracting a proper speech recognition dictionary from said hierarchical dictionary section; list storing means for storing the extracted speech recognition dictionary; speech input means for inputting a speech; recognizing means for comparing an input speech with the reference speech information in the speech recognition dictionary stored in said list storing means to recognize the speech; wherein said extracting means extracts a speech recognition dictionary belonging to a lower hierarchical level of the reference speech information corresponding to the speech recognized and said list storing means updates and stores the extracted speech recognition dictionary, said speech recognition apparatus; wherein reference speech information representative of hierarchical-level skipping is prepared in a predetermined speech recognition dictionary so that, when said recognizing means recognizes a speech input corresponding to the reference speech information representative of hierarchical-level skipping, said extracting means extracts, and updates and stores to said list storing means, a speech recognition dictionary belonging to a lower hierarchical level of the reference speech information stored in said list storing means.