METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MULTI-LEVEL DISTRIBUTED SPEECH RECOGNITION

A system and method for multi-level distributed speech recognition includes a terminal (122) having a terminal speech recognizer (136) coupled to a microphone (130). The terminal speech recognizer (136) receives an audio command (37), generating at least one terminal recognized audio command having a terminal confidence value. A network element (124) having at least one network speech recognizer (150) also receives the audio command (149), generating a at least one network recognized audio command having a network confidence value. A comparator (152) receives the recognized audio commands, comparing compares the speech recognition confidence values. The comparator (152) provides an output (162) to a dialog manager (160) of at least one recognized audio command, wherein the dialog manager then executes an operation based on the at least one recognized audio command, such as presenting the at least one recognized audio command to a user for verification or accessing a content server.