A system, method and computer-readable storage device provides an improved speech processing approach in which hyper parameters used for speech recognition are modified dynamically or in batch mode rather than fixed statically. The method includes estimating, via a model trained on audio data and/or metadata, a set of parameters useful for performing automatic speech recognition, receiving speech at an automatic speech recognition system, applying, by the automatic speech recognition system, the set of parameters to processing the speech to yield text and outputting the text from the automatic speech recognition system.