Methods and systems are provided for assisting operation of a vehicle using speech recognition. One method involves analyzing a transcription of an audio communication with respect to the vehicle to characterize a nonstandard pattern within the transcription of the audio communication, obtaining a ground truth for the transcription of the audio communication, determining one or more performance metrics associated with the nonstandard pattern within the transcription based on a relationship between the transcription of the audio communication and the ground truth for the transcription, updating a speech recognition vocabulary for the vehicle to include the nonstandard pattern based at least in part on the one or more performance metrics and determining an updated speech recognition model for the vehicle using the updated speech recognition vocabulary and the audio communication.