1. A method, comprising: issuing a verbal prompt to a user; receiving an acoustic input from the user in response to the verbal prompt; processing one or more sequences of phonemes to obtain one or more acoustic representations, wherein the one or more sequences of phonemes are generated from a list of expected responses to the issued verbal prompt; comparing the acoustic input from the user to the one or more acoustic representations; and adjusting one or more speech recognition parameters based on the comparison, wherein the one or more adjusted speech recognition parameters are used to adjust a speech recognition module of a speech recognition system; wherein the steps are performed by at least one processor device coupled to a memory.