In the field of human-machine interaction, automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a prominent research area since the 1950s. Single-word speech recognition is widely used in voice command systems, which can be implemented in various applications such as access control systems, robots, and voice-enabled devices. This study describes the implementation of a single-word speech recognition system using wave atoms transform (WAT) and frequency-mel cepstral coefficients (MFCC) on a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi 3) board. The WAT-MFCC approach is combined with a support vector machine (SVM). The experiment was conducted on an Arabic word database, and the results showed that the proposed WAT-MFCC-SVM method is highly reliable, achieving a detection rate of 100% and a real-time factor (RTF) of 1.50.