In this paper, the opening work on the development of a Lithuanian HMM speech recognition system is described. The triphone single‐Gaussian HMM speech recognition system based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) was developed using HTK toolkit. Hidden Markov model's parameters were estimated from phone‐level hand‐annotated Lithuanian speech corpus. The system was evaluated on a speaker‐independent ∼750 distinct isolated‐word recognition task. Though the speaker adaptation and language modeling techniques were not used, the system was performing at 20% word error rate.