In order to prove the potential power of "learning by examples" paradigm for problems of Automatic Speech Recognition, an experiment was set up, regarding an extremely difficult Italian phonetic recognition problem: the automatic discrimination of the so called Italian alphabet i-set: /bi/, /tSi/, /di/, /dZi/, /!/, /pi/, /ti/, NM plus other two i-like stimuli /LI/, /si/. The achieved speaker independent mean recognition rate was around 65%, but either better results are expected at the end of the experiments going on.