As mobile computing devices grow smaller and as in-car computing platforms become more common, we must augment traditional methods of human-computer interaction. Although speech interfaces have existed for years, the constrained system resources of pervasive devices, such as limited memory and processing capabilities, present new challenges. We provide an overview of embedded automatic speech recognition (ASR) on the pervasive device and discuss its ability to help us develop pervasive applications that meet today's marketplace needs. ASR recognizes spoken words and phrases. State-of-the-art ASR uses a phoneme-based approach for speech modeling: it gives each phoneme (or elementary speech sound) in the language under consideration a statistical representation expressing its acoustic properties.