Update this question was previously titled as \"Give me the name of a simple algorithm for signal(sound) pattern detection\"
Admittedly this is not my area of expertise but my first thought is a recursive least squares filter - it performs autocorrelation. It's similar to the convolution filter you're using now but a bit more advanced. Kalman filtering is an extension of this - it's used to regenerate a signal from multiple noisy measurements so it's probably not useful in this case. I would not reject offhand neural networks - they're very useful at this sort of thing (provided you train them properly).
Thinking about this more in depth I would probably recommend using an FFT. Chances are the signal you're looking for is very band-limited, and you'd probably have more luck using a bandpass filter on the data then an FFT and finally using your simple convolution filter on that data instead of the time-domain data points. Or do both and have twice the data. I'm not heavy into math so I cant' tell you if you'll get significant (not linearly-dependent) results using this method but the only thing you're losing is time.