1. A method of recognizing a speech utterance from a user at a network server system comprising the steps of: a) evaluating an amount of computing resources available at the network server system for performing speech recognition operations 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; b) specifying a first set of speech recognition operations to be performed by the network server system on said speech related data from the client device in response to step (a); 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; further wherein full recognition of the speech utterance is performed across a distributed client—server system.