Disclosed speech recognition techniques improve user-perceived latency while maintaining accuracy by: receiving an audio stream, in parallel, by a primary (e.g., accurate) speech recognition engine (SRE) and a secondary (e.g., fast) SRE; generating, with the primary SRE, a primary result; generating, with the secondary SRE, a secondary result; appending the secondary result to a word list; and merging the primary result into the secondary result in the word list. Combining output from the primary and secondary SREs into a single decoder as described herein improves user-perceived latency while maintaining or improving accuracy, among other advantages.