<p>An automatic speech recognition (ASR) apparatus for an embedded device application is described. A speech decoder receives an input sequence of speech feature vectors in a first language and outputs an acoustic segment lattice representing a probabilistic combination of basic linguistic units in a second language. A vocabulary matching module compares the acoustic segment lattice to vocabulary models in the first language to determine an output set of probability-ranked recognition hypotheses. A detailed matching module compares the set of probability-ranked recognition hypotheses to detailed match models in the first language to determine a recognition output representing a vocabulary word most likely to correspond to the input sequence of speech feature vectors.</p>