Audio recognition peripheral system

The field of the present invention is integrated circuits for implementing audio recognition. More particularly, the present invention includes an apparatus and method of providing an audio recognition peripheral system allowing for a highly efficient implementation of an audio recognition process. The present invention includes a novel audio recognition peripheral system and method. The audio recognition peripheral system comprises an audio recognition peripheral a programmable processor such as a microprocessor or microcontroller. In one embodiment, the audio recognition peripheral includes a feature extractor and vector processor. The feature extractor receives an audio signal and extracts recognition features. The extracted audio recognition features are transmitted to the programmable processor and processed in accordance with an audio recognition algorithm. During execution of the audio recognition algorithm, the programmable processor signals the audio recognition peripheral to perform vector operations. Thus, computationally intensive recognition operations are advantageously offloaded to the peripheral.