A method and apparatus combining the advantages of phonetic search such as the rapid implementation and deployment and medium accuracy, comprising steps and components for receiving the audio signal captured in the call center environment, extracting a multiplicity of feature vectors from the audio signal, creating a phoneme lattice from the multiplicity of feature vectors wherein the phoneme lattice comprising one or more allophone and each allophone comprising two or more phonemes, creating a hybrid phoneme-word lattice from the phoneme lattice and extracting the word by analyzing the hybrid phoneme-Word lattice.