A method of automated speech recognition in a vehicle. The method includes receiving audio in the vehicle, pre-processing the received audio to generate acoustic feature vectors, decoding the generated acoustic feature vectors to produce at least one speech hypothesis, and post-processing the at least one speech hypothesis using pitch to improve speech recognition accuracy. The speech hypothesis can be accepted as recognized speech during post-processing if pitch is present in the received audio. Alternatively, a pitch count for the received audio can be determined, N-best speech hypotheses can be post-processed by comparing the pitch count to syllable counts associated with the speech hypotheses, and the speech hypothesis having a syllable count equal to the pitch count can be accepted as recognized speech.