The ANN‐based approach is an alternate to the HMM method which is the currently dominant technology in the field of speech recognition. This paper is an overview of the RNN‐based approaches to Mandarin speech recognition. Some RNN‐based approaches proposed previously: syllable‐boundary pre‐segmentation, broad‐class pre‐classification, prosodic phrase boundary detection, and isolated and continuous syllable recognitions are discussed. We find from the survey that these approaches are all effective. So the RNN technology is comparable to the conventional HMM method on Mandarin speech recognition.