Speech Systems Incorporated produces a commercial speech recognition system based on a phonetic recognizer called the Phonetic Engine (TM). This system supports continuous speech recognition with large vocabularies and with a single phonetic dictionary for all speakers. The output of the Phonetic Engine is a series of phonetic "codes." Each code value identifies the most probable phoneme, as well as the likelihood that other confusable phonemes were spoken. The motivation for this representation and its details will be discussed. In addition, recognition accuracy results for the Phonetic Engine will be presented.