Speech recognition is a fascinating application of digital signal processing that has many real-world applications. Speech recognition can be used to automate many tasks that previously required hands-on human interaction. Recognizing natural speech is a challenging task. Human speech is parameterized over many variables such as amplitude, pitch, and phonetic emphasis that vary from speaker to speaker. This paper presents a vowel (devanagri vowels) recognition system based on the LPC model used as a feature extraction technique and distance measure for recognition purpose. It was determined in the course of its testing that the system recognized 88% vowels from the database. In order to improve the efficiency of the system not only can we increase the database but also better techniques like neural networks and hidden Markov models can be incorporated.