SPHERIC is a new IC that has been designed specially for automatic speech recognition applications in Consumer Electronics with a vocabulary of up to 126 words. It allows real-time recognition of both speaker dependent and independent words spoken continuously or in an isolated way. Key word spotting and playback of coded messages and user trained words are additional features. After a short system overview the hardware architecture and software structure are presented in this paper. The techniques for reducing computation time and necessary memory size are examined in more detail. Finally, the implemented speech recognition algorithm is described.