Patent ID: 8694316

Claim:
A method for controlling operation of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, comprising acts of: comparing sounds within an input audio signal with phones of an acoustic model to identify candidate matching phones, the input audio signal comprising a first user input; calculating recognition confidence scores for individual candidate matching phones; evaluating the recognition confidence scores to identify at least one phone of the candidate matching phones having a particular recognition confidence characteristic, wherein the act of evaluating the recognition confidence scores comprises combining the calculated recognition confidence scores with a calculated inherent likelihood of confusion between a phone and at least one other shone to obtain a combined result and then comparing the combined result with the particular recognition confidence characteristic; and selecting a user prompt for eliciting at least one subsequent user input that differs from the first user input, wherein the user prompt is selected based at least in part on a determination of whether the user is expected to speak the identified at least one phone in response to the user prompt.