A method and respective system for operating a speech recognition system, in which a plurality of recognizer programs are accessible to be activated for speech recognition, and are combined on a per need basis in order to efficiently improve the results of speech recognition done by a single recognizer. In order to adapt such system to the dynamically changing acoustic conditions of various operating environments and to the particular requirements of running in embedded systems having only a limited computing power available, it is proposed to a) collect selection base data characterizing speech recognition boundary conditions, e.g. the speaker person and the environmental noise, etc., with sensor means, and b) using program-controlled arbiter means for evaluating the collected data, e.g., a decision engine including software mechanism and a physical sensor, to select the best suited recognizer or a combination thereof out of the plurality of available recognizers.