Disclosed are systems, methods and computer readable media for applying a multi-state barge-in acoustic model in a spoken dialogue system comprising the steps of (1) presenting a prompt to a user from the spoken dialog system. (2) receiving an audio speech input from the user during the presentation of the prompt, (3) accumulating the audio speech input from the user, (4) applying a non-speech component having at least two one-state Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to the audio speech input from the user, (5) applying a speech component having at least five three-state HMMs to the audio speech input from the user, in which each of the five three-state HMMs represents a different phonetic category, (6) determining whether the audio speech input is a barge-in-speech input from the user, and (7) if the audio speech input is determined to be the barge-in-speech input from the user, terminating the presentation of the prompt.