Abstract: Obtaining training material for rarely used English words and common given names from countries where English is not spoken is difficult due to excessive time, storage and cost factors. By considering personal privacy, language-independent (LI) with lightweight speaker-dependent (SD) automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a convenient option to solve the problem. The dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm is the state-of-the-art algorithm for small-footprint SD ASR for real-time applications with limited storage and small vocabularies. These applications include voice dialing on mobile devices, menu-driven recognition, and voice control on vehicles and robotics. However, traditional DTW has several limitations, such as high computational complexity, constraint induced coarse approximation, and inaccuracy problems. In this paper, we introduce the merge-weighted dynamic time warping (MWDTW) algorithm. This method defines a template confidence index for measuring the similarity between merged training data and testing data, while following the core DTW process. MWDTW is simple, efficient, and easy to implement. With extensive experiments on three representative SD speech recognition datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms DTW, DTW on merged speech data, the hidden Markov model (HMM) significantly, and is also six times faster than DTW overall.