14. A pattern recognition method comprising: processing an input signal to produce phoneme-category-dependent feature sets; using a distinct phoneme recognizer to evaluate each phoneme-category-dependent feature set against category-dependent statistical models to produce a plurality of class-dependent likelihoods, wherein each phoneme category comprises one or more classes of phonemes; and combining all class-dependent likelihoods to form a final score for decision on the identity of the unknown class.
14. A pattern recognition method comprising: processing an input signal to produce phoneme-category-dependent feature sets; using a distinct phoneme recognizer to evaluate each phoneme-category-dependent feature set against category-dependent statistical models to produce a plurality of class-dependent likelihoods, wherein each phoneme category comprises one or more classes of phonemes; and combining all class-dependent likelihoods to form a final score for decision on the identity of the unknown class. 16. The method recited in claim 14 wherein, in the evaluating step, the phonemes are compared with a plurality of speech models using statistical methods for each pre-defined category.