1. A method for processing speech information in a speech recognition system, wherein the information is represented by a sequence of frames, said speech recognition system being capable of comparing a given frame set to a template, and having template memory to store said template, said processing method comprising the steps of: (a) combining contiguous acoustically similar frames of a previous frame set into representative frames to form a reduced template; (b) storing said reduced template in template memory; and (c) comparing frames of said given frame set to said representative frames of said reduced template according to the number of frames combined in said representative frames of said reduced template to produce a measure of similarity between the given frame set and the template.