A vehicle control apparatus and method use speech recognition and include: a passenger recognizing device configured to recognize passengers including a first passenger and at least one second passenger in a vehicle; a voice recognizing device configured to receive and to recognize a voice utterance by the first passenger or the at least one second passenger and to output a speech recognition result based on the received voice utterance; and a processor configured to additionally query the at least one second passenger or the first passenger based on the speech recognition result of the voice utterance of the first passenger or the at least one second passenger, respectively, to provide each of the first passenger and the at least one second passenger with a customized service.