1. A method for improving pattern matching in a speech recognition system having a plurality of acoustic models, comprising: (a) receiving continuous speech input; (b) generating a sequence of acoustic feature vectors that represent temporal and spectral behavior of the speech input; (c) loading a first group of acoustic feature vectors from the sequence of acoustic feature vectors into a memory workspace accessible to a processor; (d) loading an acoustic model from the plurality of acoustic models into the memory workspace; and (e) determining a similarity measure for each acoustic feature vector of the first group of acoustic feature vectors in relation to the acoustic model.