1. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, from a client device, a user-specified behavior requirement in a speech recognition system wherein the user-specified behavior requirement changes a setting to an input speech recognition grammar specification prior to recognizing speech to select or de-select a built-in transformation from a set of built-in transformations of the speech recognition system to apply to recognized speech, and wherein the user-specified behavior requirement includes a semantic tag that specifies at least one of: a proper name, a phone number, an address, an email address, an internet protocol address, and a web address; encoding the received user-specified behavior requirement into an input speech recognition grammar specification for the speech recognition system; receiving a request to recognize speech from an application; recognizing the speech to form a recognized word sequence; transforming the recognized word sequence according to the user-specified behavior requirement according to a semantic tag associated with the word sequence; and providing the transformed sequence to the application.