Disclosed herein is a system, method and computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computing device according to the method. The invention relates to a system, method and computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computing device according to the method. As an example embodiment, the method uses a speech recognition decoder that operates or uses fixed point arithmetic. The exemplary method comprises representing arc costs associated with at least one finite state transducer (FST) in fixed point, representing parameters associated with a hidden Markov model (HMM) in fixed point and processing speech data in the speech recognition decoder using fixed point arithmetic for the fixed point FST arc costs and the fixed point HMM parameters. The method may also include computing at the decoder sentence hypothesis probabilities with fixed point arithmetic as type Q-2e numbers.