11. A fast vocabulary independent method for spotting words in speech comprising the steps of: converting a speech waveform into a table comprising phone-ngrams and the corresponding times of occurrence in the speech waveform of the phone-ngrams; generating phone-ngrams of at least one input word; performing a coarse match by implementing the table to identify time intervals of the input waveform having phone-ngrams associated therewith that correspond to the phone-ngrams of the at least one input word; and performing a detailed acoustic match at each of the identified time intervals of the speech waveform to finally decide whether the at least one input word was actually uttered in the identified time intervals.
11. A fast vocabulary independent method for spotting words in speech comprising the steps of: converting a speech waveform into a table comprising phone-ngrams and the corresponding times of occurrence in the speech waveform of the phone-ngrams; generating phone-ngrams of at least one input word; performing a coarse match by implementing the table to identify time intervals of the input waveform having phone-ngrams associated therewith that correspond to the phone-ngrams of the at least one input word; and performing a detailed acoustic match at each of the identified time intervals of the speech waveform to finally decide whether the at least one input word was actually uttered in the identified time intervals. 13. The method according to claim 11, wherein a time interval of the speech waveform is identified during the step of performing the coarse match search if a user-defined fraction of a total number of phone-ngrams of the at least one input word are determined to be within the time interval.