24. The method of claim 15, wherein the feature space for the model for clean speech is created by: taking a window of input speech every 10 milliseconds; computing the energy in the window, wherein the feature is related to the variation of energy across a plurality of consecutive windows.
15. A method for transcribing a segment of data that includes speech in one or more environments and non-speech data, comprising: inputting the data to a segmenter and producing a series of segments, each segment being given a type identifier tag selected from a predetermined set of classes, wherein it is assumed that the input data is produced by a parallel combination of models, each model corresponding to one of the predetermined classes, the identifier tag assigned to a segment being the class identifier tag of the model that gives the segment the highest probability, subject to certain constraints, wherein a number of classes that the acoustic input can be classified into are identified that represent the most acoustically dissimilar classes possible and, wherein the process of creating the models comprises identifying a feature space for the individual predetermined classes; and transcribing each type identifier tagged segment using a specific system created for that type.