The factors that make speech recognition difficult are examined, and the potential of neural computers for this purpose is discussed. A speaker-adaptive system that transcribes dictation using an unlimited vocabulary is presented that is based on a neural network processor for the recognition of phonetic units of speech. The acoustic preprocessing, vector quantization, neural network model, and shortcut learning algorithm used are described. The utilization of phonotopic maps and of postprocessing in symbolic forms are discussed. Hardware implementations and performance of the neural networks are considered. >