Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer-readable storage devices for processing audio signals. An example system configured to practice the method receives audio at a device to be transmitted to a remote speech processing system. The system analyzes one of noise conditions, need for an enhanced speech quality, and network load to yield an analysis. Based on the analysis, the system determines to bypass user-defined options for enhancing audio for speech processing. Then, based on the analysis, the system can modify an audio transmission parameter used to transmit the audio from the device to the remote speech processing system. The audio transmission parameter can be one of an amount of coding, a chosen codec, or a number of audio channels, for example.