17. An electronic system configured to perform speech processing comprising: an audio detection system configured to receive a signal and generate a representation of speech as a sparse set of events in time; a memory having stored therein a database of keyword models describing an evolution of events associated with each keyword in the database of keywords; a processor configured to: i) receive the representation of speech from the audio detection system; ii) decompose the representation of speech into a sparse set of phonetic impulses; iii) access the database of keywords and convolve the sparse set of phonetic impulses information in the database of keyword models; iv) identify keywords within the speech signal based on iii); and v) generate an output signal based on the keywords identified in iv).
18. The system of claim 17 wherein the processor is further configured to compute a score for the sparse set of phonetic impulses at each of a plurality of frames in time that relates a probability that a word occurred at particular point in time associated with a given frame in the plurality of frames in time.