4. A system for altering a speech recognition module adapted to identify words from a speech signal, comprising: a set of training audio signals indicative of speech; a set of training text transcriptions corresponding to text of the audio signals; and a training module adapted to apply an objective function to the speech recognition module to determine a first objective function value based on a plurality of parameters for the speech recognition module, the plurality of parameters including feature extraction parameters and acoustic model parameters, and wherein the training module is adapted to jointly train the feature extraction parameters and acoustic model parameters based on the first objective function value, wherein the feature extraction parameters are utilized by a front-end feature extraction module of the speech recognition module to extract features from input speech, the extracted features being provided to a decoder that utilizes a back-end acoustic model having the acoustic model parameters to generate an output for the input speech, wherein the training module is further adapted to apply the objective function to the adjusted feature extraction parameters and the adjusted acoustic model parameters to determine a second objective function value as a function of the adjusted parameters, wherein the training module is further adapted to adjust the adjusted parameters based on the second objective function value.
4. A system for altering a speech recognition module adapted to identify words from a speech signal, comprising: a set of training audio signals indicative of speech; a set of training text transcriptions corresponding to text of the audio signals; and a training module adapted to apply an objective function to the speech recognition module to determine a first objective function value based on a plurality of parameters for the speech recognition module, the plurality of parameters including feature extraction parameters and acoustic model parameters, and wherein the training module is adapted to jointly train the feature extraction parameters and acoustic model parameters based on the first objective function value, wherein the feature extraction parameters are utilized by a front-end feature extraction module of the speech recognition module to extract features from input speech, the extracted features being provided to a decoder that utilizes a back-end acoustic model having the acoustic model parameters to generate an output for the input speech, wherein the training module is further adapted to apply the objective function to the adjusted feature extraction parameters and the adjusted acoustic model parameters to determine a second objective function value as a function of the adjusted parameters, wherein the training module is further adapted to adjust the adjusted parameters based on the second objective function value. 8. The system of claim 4 wherein the objective function value is determined based on a correct output given an audio signal.