Android Docs say very clearly that SpeechRecognition is not intended to use as Continues Speech Recognition, but there is a way to trigger the SpeechRecognizer from a voice command, You should try PocketSphinx, a very good library that react to "magic" word and react to it(it's continues recognition is not good enough for my opinion). the combination between the pocket Sphinx and this implementation is a very good idea. check out PocketSphinx here: https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx-android-demo