Twilio provides several best practices to improve speech recognition performance in their IVR and Virtual Agent applications, including utilizing mobile devices for better audio quality, choosing a high-quality PSTN connection provider, leveraging "Hints" in the `<Gather>` verb, using Enhanced Speech Recognition with Twilio's recommended Google ASR speech model, engineering prompts to encourage natural and clear speech input, keeping it clean by filtering profanities, offering Dual-Tone Multi-frequency (DTMF) as a backup input method when speech recognition fails, streaming speech data to an external speech recognition provider, leveraging confidence scoring in the prompting application, and implementing 2FA or other post-processing techniques to deal with near-homonyms. By following these best practices, developers can maximize the odds of a superior automated self-service experience with Twilio.