A system, method, apparatus, signal-bearing medium, and means for transmitting speech activity in a distributed voice recognition (VR) system. The distributed voice recognition system includes a local VR engine in a subscriber unit (102) and a server VR engine on a server (160). The local VR engine comprises a voice activity detection (VAD) module (106) that detects voice activity within a speech signal, and comprises an advanced feature extraction (AFE) module (104) that extracts features from a speech signal. The detected voice activity information is transmitted over a first wireless communication channel to the server (160). The feature extraction information is transmitted over a second wireless communication channel, separate from the first wireless communication channel, to the server (160). The server (160) processes the received information to determine a linguistic estimate of the electrical speech signal, and transmits the linguistic estimate to the subscriber unit (102).