With the ultimate goal of automatically transcribing speech phonetically in real time, this report focuses on the ability to automatically transcribe vowels in real time. For the first part of the report, human speech production was examined, including the resulting acoustic signal, as well as how it can be analyzed using signal processing methods, such as zero-crossing rate and linear predictive coding. With this background, an algorithm was created for automatically detecting vowel segments of speech, as well as estimating which vowel was spoken. The algorithm was programmed and tested in MATLAB. The results did not fulfill the requirements defined in the report. Vowel detection may be difficult to improve on with the goal of running the algorithm in real time, however the vowel estimation had an obvious flaw which may be solvable with further development.