15. A method as in claim 14 wherein said end-time distribution generating step for each given phone includes the steps of: determining a start-time distribution for a current phone from the end-time distribution of the previous phone; setting a uniform length probability for each label string length that (a) may have been produced by a given phone and (b) is between a minimum length having a non-zero probability and a predefined maximum length; thereby defining a length psuedo-distribution that is characterized (a) as uniform between the minimum length and maximum length and (b) as zero for all other lengths; setting, for each of a plurality of labels, a label probability replacement value that a given phone machine produces a given label at any transition in the phone machine; and determining the probability of end-times in an end-time distribution based on label output replacement values and start-time distribution.
14. A method of performing an acoustic match of words in a vocabulary against a string of labels which represent a speech input, the method comprising the steps of: entering as inputs to the phone machine of a given phone (a) the string of labels and (b) a respective start-time distribution for the given phone; and generating (a) an end-time distribution and (b) a match value of the given phone relative to the entered labels based on the generated end-time distribution; the match value generated for each particular phone corresponding to the probability that said each particular phone produced the entered string of labels.