1. A system that facilitates modeling unobserved speech dynamics comprising: an input component that receives acoustic data; a model component that models speech based, at least in part, upon the acoustic data, the model component comprising model parameters which characterize aspects of the unobserved dynamics in speech articulation, and, which characterize a mapping relationship from the unobserved dynamic variables to observed speech acoustics, the model parameters modified based, at least in part, upon a variational learning technique, and a technique for decoding an underlying unobserved phone sequence of speech based, at least in part, upon a variational learning technique.