Assigning meanings to spoken utterances in a speech recognition system. A
plurality of speech rules is generated, each of the of speech rules
comprising a language model and an expression associated with the
language model. At one interval (e.g. upon the detection of speech in the
system), a current language model is generated from each language model
in the speech rules for use by a recognizer. When a sequence of words is
received from the recognizer, a set of speech rules which match the
sequence of words received from the recognizer is determined. Each
expression associated with the language model in each of the set of
speech rules is evaluated, and actions are performed in the system
according to the expressions associated with each language model in the
set of speech rules.