14. A system for filtering and eliminating noise from natural language speech utterances, comprising: a microphone array configured to add one or more nulls to a beam pattern steered to point in a direction associated with a user speaking a natural language utterance to capture an input speech signal corresponding to the natural language utterance, wherein the one or more nulls notch out point or limited area noise sources from the input speech signal; an adaptive filter coupled to the microphone array, wherein the adaptive filter is configured to: receive the input speech signal corresponding to the natural language utterance from the microphone array and compare environmental, noise to the input speech signal to set one or more parameters associated with the adaptive filter; use band shaping and notch filtering to remove narrow-band noise from the input speech signal received from the microphone array according to the one or more parameters; and suppress cross-talk and environmentally caused echoes in the input speech signal received from the microphone array using adaptive echo cancellation; a speech coder arranged between the adaptive filter and a speech recognition engine, wherein the speech coder is configured to receive the input speech signal passed through the adaptive filter and use adaptive lossy audio compression to remove momentary gaps from the input speech signal and variable rate sampling to compress and digitize the input speech signal, wherein the speech coder optimizes the adaptive lossy audio compression and the variable rate sampling to only preserve components in the input speech signal that will be input to the speech recognition engine; and a transceiver configured to communicate the digitized input speech signal from a buffer in the speech coder to the speech recognition engine at a rate that depends on available bandwidth associated with a communication link that connects the transceiver and the speech recognition engine.
14. A system for filtering and eliminating noise from natural language speech utterances, comprising: a microphone array configured to add one or more nulls to a beam pattern steered to point in a direction associated with a user speaking a natural language utterance to capture an input speech signal corresponding to the natural language utterance, wherein the one or more nulls notch out point or limited area noise sources from the input speech signal; an adaptive filter coupled to the microphone array, wherein the adaptive filter is configured to: receive the input speech signal corresponding to the natural language utterance from the microphone array and compare environmental, noise to the input speech signal to set one or more parameters associated with the adaptive filter; use band shaping and notch filtering to remove narrow-band noise from the input speech signal received from the microphone array according to the one or more parameters; and suppress cross-talk and environmentally caused echoes in the input speech signal received from the microphone array using adaptive echo cancellation; a speech coder arranged between the adaptive filter and a speech recognition engine, wherein the speech coder is configured to receive the input speech signal passed through the adaptive filter and use adaptive lossy audio compression to remove momentary gaps from the input speech signal and variable rate sampling to compress and digitize the input speech signal, wherein the speech coder optimizes the adaptive lossy audio compression and the variable rate sampling to only preserve components in the input speech signal that will be input to the speech recognition engine; and a transceiver configured to communicate the digitized input speech signal from a buffer in the speech coder to the speech recognition engine at a rate that depends on available bandwidth associated with a communication link that connects the transceiver and the speech recognition engine. 19. The system recited in claim 14 , further comprising: a main unit that includes the speech recognition engine; and a speech unit that includes the microphone array, the adaptive filter, and the speech coder, wherein the main unit and the speech unit are physically separate and communicate wirelessly over the communication link.