Phonetic dictionaries are regarded as pivotal components of speech recognition systems. The function of speech recognition research is to generate a machine which will accurately identify and distinguish the normal human speech from any other speaker. Literature affirmed that Arabic phonetics is one of the major problems in Arabic speech recognition. Therefore, this paper reviews previous studies tackling the challenges faced by initiating an Arabic phonetic dictionary with respect to Arabic speech recognition. It has been found that the system of speech recognition investigated areas of differences concerning Arabic phonetics. In addition, an Arabic phonetic dictionary should be initiated where the Arabic vowels’ phonemes should be considered as a component of the consonants’ phonemes. Thus, the incorporation of developed machine translation systems may enhance the quality of the system. The current paper concludes with the existing challenges faced by Arabic phonetic dictionary.