9. A method of automatic speech recognition, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving an utterance via a microphone from a female speaker of a first language; (b) pre-processing the utterance with an automatic speech recognition pre-processor to generate acoustic feature vectors; (c) determining at least one formant frequency of the received utterance; (d) identifying at least one of a plurality of formant frequency bands in speech data from female speakers of a second language that corresponds to the at least one formant frequency determined in step (c); and (e) adapting acoustic models trained from speech from male speakers of the first language in response to the identifying step (d), to result in proxy acoustic models for the female speaker of the first language, wherein the method is carried out using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system comprising the microphone, memory, and a processor.
9. A method of automatic speech recognition, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving an utterance via a microphone from a female speaker of a first language; (b) pre-processing the utterance with an automatic speech recognition pre-processor to generate acoustic feature vectors; (c) determining at least one formant frequency of the received utterance; (d) identifying at least one of a plurality of formant frequency bands in speech data from female speakers of a second language that corresponds to the at least one formant frequency determined in step (c); and (e) adapting acoustic models trained from speech from male speakers of the first language in response to the identifying step (d), to result in proxy acoustic models for the female speaker of the first language, wherein the method is carried out using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system comprising the microphone, memory, and a processor. 10. The method of claim 9 , further comprising the step of (f) decoding the acoustic feature vectors generated in step (b) using a processor and the acoustic models adapted in step (e) to produce a plurality of hypotheses for the received utterance.