1. A speech boundary detection system comprising: an input configured to receive an audio signal comprising a continuous stream of audio frames; an initial audio sample processing system configured to receive an initial audio sample comprising a predetermined number of audio frames received during system initialization, and generate an initial background noise model using non-speech frames of the initial audio sample, the initial audio sample processing system comprising: an initial parameter computation system configured to compute initial audio signal characteristics for each frame of the initial audio sample; an initial background noise computation system configured to classify each frame of the initial audio sample as either speech or non-speech and generate the initial background noise model from the non-speech frames of the initial audio sample; and an initial speech detection system configured to determine whether a beginning of speech is present in the initial audio sample using the computed initial audio signal characteristics and the initial background noise model.