This paper proposes a new phase feature derived from the formant instantaneous characteristics for speech recognition (SR) and speaker identification (SI) systems. Using Hilbert transform (HT), the formant characteristics can be represented by instantaneous frequency (IF) and instantaneous bandwidth, namely formant instantaneous characteristics (FIC). In order to explore the importance of FIC both in SR and SI, this paper proposes different features from FIC used for SR and SI systems. When combing these new features with conventional parameters, higher identification rate can be achieved than that of using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) parameters only. The experiment results show that the new features are effective characteristic parameters and can be treated as the compensation of conventional parameters for SR and SI.