7. The ASR system of claim 4 wherein the means for evaluating resources of the system evaluates ASR ports, system resources, and call handlers.
4. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system comprising: means for processing a digital input signal from an utterance of a user; means for evaluating resources of the ASR system to determine whether the ASR system is busy processing utterances of users by monitoring port utilization and available processing power of each of a group of ASR engines; and means for selecting between a single ASR engine and the group of ASR engines to recognize the utterance of the user, wherein the selecting means utilizes the evaluation of resources to select the single ASR engine when the port utilization and available processing power are within a set of threshold values and the ASR system is busy processing the utterances of the users and to select the group of ASR engines when the port utilization and available processing power are within another set of threshold values and the ASR system is not busy processing the utterances of the users; wherein selecting the group of ASR engines to recognize the utterance of the user if available processing power is within a threshold value when the port utilization of two ASR engines is lower than a predefined threshold of 75%.