18. The method of claim 9 , wherein each likely word instance is represented by at least a start frame, a first end frame, a last end frame and multiple probability scores when the first end frame and the last end frame are different, further including using overlap between likely word instances when searching for the phrase to eliminate from consideration some of the likely word instances.
9. The method of claim 1 , applied to matching the likely word instances to catalog entries, the method further including: accessing a catalog of phrases sets each comprising multiple phrase representations; for each phrase representation, searching the reported subset of likely word instances for likely occurrences of each phrase and scoring each likely phrase occurrence for a probability of a match between the phrase and the utterance; wherein the subset of likely word instances is searched by multiple processors operating on the multiple phrase sets; and reporting at least a subset of likely phrase occurrences and respective probability scores for further processing.