A system and method to improve the automatic adaptation of one or more speech models in automatic speech recognition systems. After a dialog begins, for example, the dialog asks the customer to provide spoken input and it is recorded. If the speech recognizer determines it may not have correctly transcribed the verbal response, i.e., voice input, the invention uses monitoring and if necessary, intervention to guarantee that the next transcription of the verbal response is correct. The dialog asks the customer to repeat his verbal response, which is recorded and a transcription of the input is sent to a human monitor, i.e., agent or operator. If the transcription of the spoken input is correct, the human does not intervene and the transcription remains unmodified. If the transcription of the verbal response is incorrect, the human intervenes and the transcription of the misrecognized word is corrected. In both cases, the dialog asks the customer to confirm the unmodified and corrected transcription. If the customer confirms the unmodified or newly corrected transcription, the dialog continues and the customer does not hang up in frustration because most times only one misrecognition occurred. Finally, the invention uses the first and second customer recording of the misrecognized word or utterance along with the corrected or unmodified transcription to automatically adapt one or more speech models, which improves the performance of the speech recognition system.