A method and apparatus are disclosed for recognizing spoken commands uttered by a user and for generating responsive control signals once the command is recognized. In accordance with this disclosure the audio signal is converted into a series of count bytes representing the time between the audio signal zero crossings, and all the count bytes of the full command are then segmented into equal temporal groups and sorted within each segment into a set of frequency class intervals which are based on a computation of substantially equal byte activity in all the words comprising the command lexicon. In this manner, lower and higher frequency groups are selected for equal significance. The uttered words are then compared against stored words similarly transformed according to segment and frequency interval and if the comparison conditions are satisfied the command is executed; if not, an indication is provided to the user to repeat the command. Segmenting produces a segment period.