1. A method of processing phonemes in speech, comprising: inputting an acoustic input of digitized speech; segmenting said digitized acoustic input into a plurality of time-slices; analyzing each time-slice to identify one or more candidate phonemes based on a plurality of reference cluster sets, each cluster set representing reference phonemes for a cluster type; and outputting a phoneme stream of identified candidate phonemes based on the analysis, wherein at least some time-slices are represented by alternative candidate phonemes based on said analyzing step.