Methods and systems are provided for assisting operation of a vehicle using speech recognition. One method involves identifying a user-configured speech recognition performance setting value selected from among a plurality of speech recognition performance setting values, selecting a speech recognition model configuration corresponding to the user-configured speech recognition performance setting value from among a plurality of speech recognition model configurations, where each speech recognition model configuration of the plurality of speech recognition model configurations corresponds to a respective one of the plurality of speech recognition performance setting values, and recognizing an audio input as an input state using the speech recognition model configuration corresponding to the user-configured speech recognition performance setting value.