Identifying contacts using speech recognition

A system receives candidate strings from a speech recognition engine. Where the speech recognition indicates success, the candidate string may be reported or otherwise used. Otherwise, candidate strings may be processed by comparing collapsed forms of the candidate strings to collapsed forms of a user's contacts. The collapsed form may replace contiguous consonants with a 1 and contiguous vowels with a 0. If a candidate string has a collapsed form matching a contact's collapsed form, that contact may be used. Where multiple candidate strings match the collapsed forms of multiple contacts, the contacts may be filtered according to textual similarity to the candidate strings, proximity to a typical usage location for the contacts, and a typical usage time for the contacts.