The invention is essentially a motherboard design for personal computers which uses DSP hardware in conjunction with a general or specific purpose CPU to process command and continuous speech. The DSP hardware serves as a bridge between the audio input of the sound card or integrated sound module and the microprocessor. The DSP chip itself can serve as a processor and embedded speech engine for processing command and control speech. It can also serve as a pre-processor for continuous speech, converting the digital bit stream representing the speech to phonemes for processing by the CPU and software-based speech engine and can facilitate digital mobile phone functions and text to speech conversion.