This stud y explored the possibility of developing Amharic speech input interface to commandrnand control Microsoft Word . Toward s this end, literature were reviewed on speech recogn ition, application of speech recognition, HMM and its application in speech rec ignition , Amharicrnspeech recognition, HTK and human-computer interaction.rnSpeech input interface require s speech recognition system. To develop and te st the requiredrnAmharic speech recognition system speech data were recorded from 26 people (10 female and 16rnmale) in the age range of 20 to 35 . 76 .9% of the recorded data were used to train the recognizerrnand the remaining data were us ed for testing the performance of recognizer. Two (fixed variancernand variable variance based models) HMM-based , speak er independent, small vocab unary,rnisolated Amharic word recognizer were enveloped . The perform acne of these recognizer wasrntested using the test data. Although both of them recognized all the test data correctly, thernperformance of recognizer with variable variance performed better than the recognizer with fix edrnvariance in live environment. Thus, the recognizer with variable variance was further consid eredrnfor the development of the prototype Amharic speech input interface system.rnSpeech input interface requires communication interface that sends the recognized commandrnword to the application, Microsoft Word in this case . In this stud y the communication interfacernwas written using Visual Basic 6. To test the perform an e of the system as a whole, 18 randomlyrnselected command words were given to 6 people (3 command words for each) and these peoplernwere asked to command Microsoft Word orally. The system performed 16 commands accuratelyrnand only two command words were wrongly recognized and thus Microsoft Word performedrnwrong actions. Fin all y, the prototype speech input int interface m d eve loped in this experimentrnwas integrated with Microsoft Word as a Macro for regular use.rnThe result of the experiment showed the feasibility of developing Amharic speech input interface.rnBased on the res ult of the study and what ha s been learn ed in the course of the re searchrnrecommend at ions for further study were forwarded.