Comment by jhartmann

Actually, state of the art speech recognition has switched over to having a Recursive Neural Network directly run over the audio input. Take a look at the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5567 and http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/

However combining learning features with other systems is a very powerful approach and combining SVM's on top of the learned features of a Neural Network I would say is common. I personally am more interested in approaches like Deep Fried Convnets (http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7149) that combine kernel methods as part of the Neural Networks themselves.