Abstract: A new approach for speeding the process of pattern matching is presented. The digital pattern （unknown or reference） is divided into 4 （or more） subpatterns of equal size, and the pattern matching is performed in 4 steps. At every step only one subpattern is used to perform pattern matching, and a part of reference patterns which have less distances to the unknown pattern are retained to match further in the next step. In this approach, the pattern matching can be speeded 3 times or more faster than the original one. A set of experiment results rate on speech recognition using such approach is given. It is shown that the correct recognition obtained by the enw method doesn't descend apparently when compared with the results of the complete pattern matching. In this way our real-time speech recognition sys-tem-RTSRS （01） can recognize 600 spoken commands in real-time.