18. The system of claim 17 wherein the initial utterance comprises spoken user input and the repeated patterns are selected from the group consisting of: words, syllables of words, and phrases of multiple words.
18. The system of claim 17 wherein the initial utterance comprises spoken user input and the repeated patterns are selected from the group consisting of: words, syllables of words, and phrases of multiple words. 19. The system of claim 18 wherein the segmentation hardware component comprises: means for identifying silence regions separating speech segments within the initial utterance; means for extracting statistical characteristics of the silence regions using an endpoint detection process; means for computing a zero-crossing rate threshold for the silence regions means for computing an energy threshold for the speech segments; means for determining if the length of a speech segment is less than a defined length threshold; and means for saving a speech segment as a reference pattern if its length is less than the defined length threshold, or dividing the speech segment into two or more sub-segments if its length is greater than the defined length threshold.