The present invention relates to a voice recognition apparatus capable of
easily registering a word which has not been registered. The registering
of an unregistered word into a dictionary can be easily performed without
causing a significant increase in the size of the dictionary. The
clustering unit detects a cluster (detected cluster) to which a new
unregistered word is to be added as a new member, from existing clusters
obtained by clustering unregistered words. The unregistered word is added
as a new member to the detected cluster, and the cluster is divided
depending on the members of the cluster such that unregistered words
which are acoustically similar to each other belong to the same cluster.
The maintenance unit updates the word dictionary on the basis of the
result of the clustering. The present invention may be applied to a robot
including a voice recognition apparatus.