Many current systems for automatic speech processing rely on sub-word units defined using phonetic knowledge. Our paper presents an alternative to this approach - determination of speech units using ALISP (Automatic Language Independent Speech Processing) techniques. Such units were experimentally tested in a very low bit rate phonetic vocoder, where a mean bit rate of 120 bps for unit encoding was achieved. First results of comparison of an ALISP segmentation with a phonetic alignment are presented.