A computer-implemented method of transcribing a voice input to text using a language model biased according to an identified dialog state corresponding to the voice input, the method comprising: receiving, by a computing device, audio data for a voice input to the computing device, wherein the voice input corresponds to a stage of a multi-stage voice dialog between the computing device and a user of the computing device, wherein the stage is a dialog stage from amongst a plurality of dialog stages and each dialog stage is represented by a respective dialog state; providing by the computing device an estimate for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog and representing the estimate as a dialog state hint; providing, by the computing device to a speech recognizer, a request to transcribe voice input to text, wherein the request comprises: (i) the audio data for the voice input to the computing device and (ii) the dialog state hint; determining by the speech recognizer a predicted dialog state and a plurality of N-grams associated with the predicted dialog state for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog to be the estimate for the stage of the multi-stage dialog represented by the hint, said determining comprising verifying whether the hint is accurate using context data wherein the context data comprises at least one of a user interface hash value that characterizes the user interface displayed on the device at or near a time that the voice input was provided to the device, location data, user account information or anonymized user profile data; generating by the speech recognizer a transcription of the voice input, the generating comprising processing the audio data with a model biased according to parameters that correspond to the predicted dialog state for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog, wherein the N-grams are used to bias the language model used by the speech recognizer to transcribe the voice input to text; obtaining, by the computing device and from the speech recognizer, the transcription of the voice input; and returning the transcription of the voice input with the computing device. receiving, by a computing device, audio data for a voice input to the computing device, wherein the voice input corresponds to a stage of a multi-stage voice dialog between the computing device and a user of the computing device, wherein the stage is a dialog stage from amongst a plurality of dialog stages and each dialog stage is represented by a respective dialog state; providing by the computing device an estimate for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog and representing the estimate as a dialog state hint; providing, by the computing device to a speech recognizer, a request to transcribe voice input to text, wherein the request comprises: (i) the audio data for the voice input to the computing device and (ii) the dialog state hint; determining by the speech recognizer a predicted dialog state and a plurality of N-grams associated with the predicted dialog state for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog to be the estimate for the stage of the multi-stage dialog represented by the hint, said determining comprising verifying whether the hint is accurate using context data wherein the context data comprises at least one of a user interface hash value that characterizes the user interface displayed on the device at or near a time that the voice input was provided to the device, location data, user account information or anonymized user profile data; generating by the speech recognizer a transcription of the voice input, the generating comprising processing the audio data with a model biased according to parameters that correspond to the predicted dialog state for the stage of the multi-stage voice dialog, wherein the N-grams are used to bias the language model used by the speech recognizer to transcribe the voice input to text; obtaining, by the computing device and from the speech recognizer, the transcription of the voice input; and returning the transcription of the voice input with the computing device.