A system and means for recognising phrases of approval, questions and answers in speech conversations exchanged between communication devices such that the phrase recognition means is conditional upon detection of a non-speech event from the devices to denote a subject of interest, the phrase recognition means employing detection of non-speech events from the devices to identify and select speech recognition rules of relevance to the subject item, questions about the subject and answers to the questions. Speech recognition means logs detected speech and non-speech events to a repository for later analysis.