38. A method for processing a spoken utterance consisting of a sequence of phonemes, said method comprising the steps of: detecting the frequency distribution of the energy of the utterance for a plurality of time intervals within the duration of a single phoneme; passing the detected energy through a plurality of lowpass filters; amplifying the output of adjacent lowpass filters with difference amplifiers to separate the detected energy into a plurality of frequency bandwidths; passing the output of the difference amplifiers to respective upward and downward edge detectors to generate step functions of fixed amplitude and duration; summing the step functions of adjacent, overlapping sets of upward and downward edge detectors respectively to generate upward and downward sweep spectra; passing the output of adjacent sets of difference amplifiers through a plurality of summing amplifiers; and summing the outputs of the summing amplifiers to generate at least one energy spectrum, whereby the spoken phoneme can be represented by the energy spectrum and the sweep spectra to facilitate speech recognition.
38. A method for processing a spoken utterance consisting of a sequence of phonemes, said method comprising the steps of: detecting the frequency distribution of the energy of the utterance for a plurality of time intervals within the duration of a single phoneme; passing the detected energy through a plurality of lowpass filters; amplifying the output of adjacent lowpass filters with difference amplifiers to separate the detected energy into a plurality of frequency bandwidths; passing the output of the difference amplifiers to respective upward and downward edge detectors to generate step functions of fixed amplitude and duration; summing the step functions of adjacent, overlapping sets of upward and downward edge detectors respectively to generate upward and downward sweep spectra; passing the output of adjacent sets of difference amplifiers through a plurality of summing amplifiers; and summing the outputs of the summing amplifiers to generate at least one energy spectrum, whereby the spoken phoneme can be represented by the energy spectrum and the sweep spectra to facilitate speech recognition. 40. The method of claim 38 wherein the summing amplifier summing step includes summing the outputs of the summing amplifiers for a first time interval and a second time interval longer than the first time interval to generate a short time constant energy spectrum and a long time constant energy spectrum.