1. A computing device for performing large vocabulary speech recognition comprising: processor readable memory; one or more processors capable of executing program instructions read from said memory; a microphone or audio input for providing an electronic signal representing an utterance to be recognized; a speaker or audio output for enabling an electronic representation of sound produced in said device to be transduced into a corresponding sound; programming recorded in the memory including: speech recognition programming for performing large vocabulary speech recognition that responds to the electronic representations of a sequence of one or more utterances received from the microphone or audio input by producing a text output corresponding to the one or more words recognized as corresponding to the utterances; and TTS programming for providing TTS output to said speaker or audio output saying one or more words of said text recognized by said speech recognition; and shared speech modeling data stored in said memory that is used by said speech recognition programming to recognize words corresponding to spoken utterances and by said TTS programming to generate sounds corresponding to the speaking of a sequence of one or more words.