5. A method of operating a speech recognition system, said method comprising the steps of: identifying a speaker by text-independent comparison of an input speech signal with a stored representation of speech signals corresponding to one of a plurality of speakers, said input speech signal including a plurality of words, providing a speech processing model to said speech recognition system in accordance with results of said identifying step, and recognizing said plurality of words within said input speech signal with said speech processing model, said stored representation of speech signals and said speech processing model being loaded into said system only once for recognition of said speaker and said plurality of words in said input speech signal so that said system performs continues speech recognition for said plurality of words, determining whether to perform speech recognition in one of a speaker-independent mode or a speaker-dependent mode; and selecting said speech processing model to be a speaker-dependent model or a speaker-independent model based on said determining step.
5. A method of operating a speech recognition system, said method comprising the steps of: identifying a speaker by text-independent comparison of an input speech signal with a stored representation of speech signals corresponding to one of a plurality of speakers, said input speech signal including a plurality of words, providing a speech processing model to said speech recognition system in accordance with results of said identifying step, and recognizing said plurality of words within said input speech signal with said speech processing model, said stored representation of speech signals and said speech processing model being loaded into said system only once for recognition of said speaker and said plurality of words in said input speech signal so that said system performs continues speech recognition for said plurality of words, determining whether to perform speech recognition in one of a speaker-independent mode or a speaker-dependent mode; and selecting said speech processing model to be a speaker-dependent model or a speaker-independent model based on said determining step. 6. A method as recited in claim 5, wherein said stored representation of speech signals includes a plurality of codebooks, each codebook including a plurality of codewords comprising mean and variance values of parameters of clusters of feature vectors computed from frames of speech signals corresponding to an enrolled speaker, wherein said identifying step includes the steps of sampling frames of said input speech signal, computing feature vectors from frames of said input speech signal, comparing parameters of ones of said feature vectors computed in said computing step with said stored mean and variance values to derive a score, and counting the number of feature vectors which correspond to each said codebook in accordance with results of said step of comparing parameters.