Voice dialing method and apparatus for mobile phone

A voice dialing method for a mobile phone, comprising:

• receiving a speech in a voice recognition mode;
• searching for a word or a numeral sequence corresponding to the speech in a phonebook;
• dialing, if the word or the numeral sequence is searched from the phonebook, a phone number corresponding to the word or the numeral sequence;
• decomposing, if the word or the numeral sequence is not searched from the phonebook, a plurality of characters from the speech;
• extracting a numeral corresponding to each character of the decomposed plurality of characters;
• displaying the extracted numerals;
• retrieving, if the extracted numerals are a user-intended sequence, at least one of phone numbers corresponding to the extracted numerals from the phonebook;
• displaying the at least one of the retrieved phone numbers;
• and
• dialing a specific phone number selected from the displayed at least one of the retrieved phone numbers.

A voice recognition-enabled mobile phone comprising:

• an audio processing unit for processing a speech input through a microphone;
• a memory unit for storing a phonebook, a mapping table listing characters matched with numerals, and a voice dialing application;
• and
• a control unit for decomposing a plurality of characters from the speech, translating each character of the plurality of decomposed characters into a corresponding numeral with reference to the mapping table, displaying the corresponding numerals, retrieving at least one of phone numbers corresponding to the corresponding numerals from a phonebook when the numerals are a user-intended numeral sequence, displaying the at least one of the retrieved phone numbers, and dialing a specific phone number selected from the displayed at least one of the retrieved phone numbers.