A method for improved initialization of speech recognition system comprises mapping a trained hidden markov model based recognition node network (HMM) to a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) based node label scheme. The central state of each frame in the HMM are mapped to CTC-labeled output nodes and the non-central states of each frame are mapped to CTC-blank nodes to generate a CTC-labeled HMM and each central state represents a phoneme from human speech detected and extracted by a computing device. Next the CTC-labeled HMM is trained using a cost function, wherein the cost function is not part of a CTC cost function. Finally the CTC-labeled HMM is trained using a CTC cost function to produce a CTC node network. The CTC node network may be iteratively trained by repeating the initialization steps.