Techniques for combining the results of multiple recognizers in a distributed speech recognition architecture. Speech data input to a client device is encoded and processed both locally and remotely by different recognizers configured to be proficient at different speech recognition tasks. The client/server architecture is configurable to enable network providers to specify a policy directed to a trade-off between reducing recognition latency perceived by a user and usage of network resources. The results of the local and remote speech recognition engines are combined based, at least in part, on logic stored by one or more components of the client/server architecture.