The invention relates to a method for recognizing a phonetic sound sequence or a character sequence, e.g. according to the ASCII standards, comprising the following steps: a) the sequence is fed to a neural network, b) in said neural network, a sequence of characteristics is formed from the phonetic sequence or character sequence, by taking into consideration phonetic and/or lexical stored information and/or based on a character string sequence (blank characters), c) the character sequence thus formed is compared with a characteristic combination that has a defined statement content, said combination being formed from stored lexical and semantic information, based on the characteristic sequence, d) step c is repeated using new character combinations until, by the reduction of contradictions, a character combination is found that at least largely corresponds with the character sequence, e) the statement content of the character combination with the least number of contradictions is output as the result and/or an action assigned to the statement content is carried out.