The Speech Recognition Group at Olivetti has designed an isolated word recognition system for Italian which runs on a MS-DOS personal computer and can accept a very large vocabulary in excess of 60,000 words. The system is speaker adapted rather than fully trained: a new speaker is requested to pronounce only 40 words. The system accepts natural language without any restriction and can be used to dictate documents of generic content. The results of a real dictation experiment with an active vocabulary of 30,000 words are presented.