1. A method comprising: receiving, by a computing device, an acoustic input signal at a speech recognizer; identifying, by the computing device, a user that is speaking based on the acoustic input signal; recognizing, by the computing device via the speech recognizer, speech uttered by the user in the acoustic input signal; determining, by the computing device, speaker-specific information previously stored for the user; determining, by the computing device, a set of potential responses based on the recognized speech and the speaker-specific information for the user; ranking, by the computing device, the set of potential responses based on one or more criteria and the speaker-specific information; determining, by the computing device for each response in the set of potential responses, whether the response should be output or should not be output based on the response's ranking; and if the response should be output: selecting, by the computing device from among a plurality of preconfigured output methods, an output method for outputting the response to the user, the selecting being based on the response's ranking; and outputting, by the computing device, the response to the user using the selected output method.
3. The method of claim 1 wherein the response is outputted after a user speaks a trigger phrase to activate the speech recognizer.