A tailored speaker-independent voice recognition system has a speech recognition dictionary (360) with at least one word (371). That word (371) has at least two transcriptions (373), each transcription (373) having a probability factor (375) and an indicator (377) of whether the transcription is active. When a speech utterance is received (510), the voice recognition system determines (520, 530) the word signified by the speech utterance, evaluates (540) the speech utterance against the transcriptions of the correct word, updates (550) the probability factors for each transcription, and inactivates (570) any transcription that has an updated probability factor that is less than a threshold.