a system and method related to a new approach to speech recognition that reacts to concepts conveyed through speech . in its fullest implementation , the system and method shifts the balance of power in speech recognition from straight sound recognition and statistical models to a more powerful and complete approach determining and addressing conveyed concepts . this is done by using a probabilistically unbiased multi - phoneme recognition process , followed by a phoneme stream analysis process that builds the list of candidate words derived from recognized phonemes , followed by a permutation analysis process that produces sequences of candidate words with high potential of being syntactically valid , and finally , by processing targeted syntactic sequences in a conceptual analysis process to generate the utterance &# 39 ; s conceptual representation that can be used to produce an adequate response . the invention can be employed for a myriad of applications , such as improving accuracy or automatically generating punctuation for transcription and dictation , word or concept spotting in audio streams , concept spotting in electronic text , customer support , call routing and other command / response scenarios .