US Patent 7197331 Method and apparatus for selective distributed speech recognition

A method and apparatus for selective distributed speech recognition includes an embedded speech recognition engine (104) and a dialog manager (102), such as a browser, coupled to the embedded speech recognition engine (104). The method and apparatus further includes the dialog manager (102) being operably couple able to at least one external speech recognition engine (106), such as a WLAN speech recognition engine (108) or a network speech recognition engine (110). The method and apparatus further includes preference information (114), environment information (112) and a speech input (116) all provided to the dialog manager (102). The dialog manager (102), in response to the preference information (114) and the environment information (112), provides the speech input (116) to the embedded speech recognition engine (104), the WLAN speech recognition engine (108) or the network speech recognition engine (110).