Speech interface to computer is the next big step that the technology needs to take for general users. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) will play an important role in taking technology to the people. There are numerous applications of speech recognition such as direct voice input in aircraft, data entry, speech-to-text processing, voice user interfaces such as voice dialling. ASR system can be divided into two different parts, namely feature extraction and feature recognition. In this paper we present MATLAB based feature recognition using backpropagation neural network for ASR. The objective of this research is to explore how neural networks can be employed to recognize isolated-word speech as an alternative to the traditional methodologies. The general techniques developed here can be further extended to other applications such as sonar target recognition, missile tracking and classification of underwater acoustic signals. Back-propagation neural network algorithm uses input training samples and their respective desired output values to learn to recognize specific patterns, by modifying the activation values of its nodes and weights of the links connecting its nodes. Such a trained network is later used for feature recognition in ASR systems.