Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a template matching approach based on dynamic programming algorithm. This paper proposes an adapted DTW algorithm for calculating the global distance matrix. Speech signals are decomposed using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) into various frequency sub-bands and the resulted sub-bands of unknown; template digit utterances are compared using the adapted DTW. The performance of the proposed approach is tested with TIDIGITs data. The results indicate that there is a reduction in the order of complexity compared to DTW and increase in the performance. © 2006-2015 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).