The EasyTalk application is a large-vocabulary speaker-independent continuous Chinese speech recognition system, i.e. Chinese dictation machine (CDM), under the WINTEL environment. Addressed in this paper are a number of novel techniques adopted in the CDM engine which is the basis of EasyTalk, including the merging-based syllable detection automaton (MBSDA) and the statistical knowledge based frame synchronous search (SKB-FSS) algorithms in the acoustic processing stage, the percentage in critical area (CAP) and recognition score gap (RSG) methods for the acceptation and rejection decision, the word search tree (WST), the N-Gram, and the syllable synchronous network search (SSNS) algorithm in the language processing stage, the embedded multiple model sheme (EMM) and the fuzzy syllable set (FSS) for the robustness purpose.