1. A method of recognizing a speech utterance from a user at a network server system, comprising: automatically evaluating an amount of computing resources available at the network server system for performing speech recognition operations during a connection on speech related data transmitted by a client device being used by the user; wherein said speech related data corresponds to partially recognized speech data; automatically specifying a first set of speech recognition operations to be performed by the network server system during said connection on said speech related data from the client device in response to the evaluating; wherein said first set of speech recognition operations are specified during an initialization period and are configurable on a connection-by-connection basis with each client device; and further wherein full recognition of the speech utterance is performed across a distributed client-server system, with said speech utterance being mapped to a predefined query/answer pair stored in a query database maintained by an operator of the network server system.