Using DTW on the MFCC's to match a spoken word to a template
Yes, this should be enough for a basic isolated word recognition system. Probably not something for a commercial product, but good enough for a university project or demo...
It would be better to ask the user to record a word and match against this, rather than attempt to match against a large database of utterances of the same word by different speakers. The larger the database the more likely you'd find an utterance matching the user's voice, but matching against a large database would be computationally expensive!
The first MFCC captures the signal energy - you might try to remove it when doing the matching (your feature vector will thus contain MFCC #2 to 13) - this will make recognition more robust to changes in amplitude.
You might have misunderstood something. Do you have a link to such a website?


A general proporty of MFCC is that as the coefficient index increases, the standard deviation of this coefficient decreases (the DCT can be thought of as an approximation of a PCA) - so the lower coefficients will have greater magnitude. You can compensate for that by estimating the standard deviation of each MFCC coefficient on a training set, once and for all, and dividing each coefficient by its standard deviation (or a power of it &lt; 1.0) prior to the DTW step.