A distributed voice recognition system and method for obtaining acoustic features and speech activity at multiple frequencies by extracting high frequency components thereof on a device, such as a subscriber station and transmitting them to a network server having multiple stream processing capability, including cepstral feature processing, MLP nonlinear transformation processing, and multiband temporal pattern architecture processing. The features received at the network server are processed using all three streams, wherein each of the three streams provide benefits not available in the other two, thereby enhancing feature interpretation. Feature extraction and feature interpretation may operate at multiple frequencies, including but not limited to 8 kHz, 11 kHz, and 16 kHz.