The paper describes how Markov chains may be applied to speech recogni
tion. In this application, a spectral vector is modeled by a state of
the Markov chain, and an utterance is represented by a sequence of sta
tes. The Markov chain model (MCM) offers a substantial reduction in co
mputation, but at the expense of a significant increase in memory requ
irement when compared to the hidden Markov model (HMM). Experiments on
isolated word recognition show that the MCM achieved results that are
comparable to those of the HMM's tested for comparison.