RESPONDING TO RANDOMLY OCCURRING NOISE

A method and system for responding to randomly occurring noise in a voice recognition application program. The system receives an audio signal representative of sound in an audio environment and processes the audio signal to identify certain non-speech sounds. A pre-defined action is performed in response to the non-speech sound which has been identified. The pre-defined action is selected from the group consisting of disabling a microphone source of the audio signal, suspending further processing of the audio signal by the speech recognition system, executing a user-defined macro, and ignoring the sound. The system may perform additional steps including recording a sound which is to be identified as a non-speech sound and assigning one of the pre-defined actions to be performed in response when the non-speech sound has been identified.