Robust automatic speech emotional-speech recognition architectures based on hybrid convolutional neural networks (CNN) and feedforward deep neural networks are proposed and named in this paper as: BFN, CNA, and HBN. BFN is a combination between bag-of-Audio-word (BoAW) and feedforward deep neural network, CNA based on CNN, finally, HBN is hybrid architecture between BFN and CNA. Overall accuracy is achieved by leveraging Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient features and bag-of-acoustic-words to feed the network, resulting in promising classification performance. In addition, the concatenated output from the proposed hybrid networks is fed into a softmax layer to produce a probability distribution over categorical classifications for speech recognition. The three proposed models are trained on eight emotional classes from the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song audio (RAVDESS) dataset. Our proposed models achieved overall precision between 81.5% and 85.5% and overall accuracy between 80.6% and 84.5%, hence outperforming state-of-the-art models using the same dataset.INDEX TERMS Bag-of-acoustic-words, convolutional neural network, feedforward deep neural network, hybrid features, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients, support vector machine. HESHAM F. A. HAMED received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics and communi-