Patent ID: 7085723

Claim:
A method for determining a speech-enabled application to receive a spoken utterance in a multi-context speech enabled environment comprising the computer implemented steps of: evaluating a plurality of contexts for speech enabled applications and prioritizing the contexts based upon a recency of relevant access characteristic, said evaluating being based upon different grammars maintained for each speech enabled application comprising persistent, foreground, and background grammars, and said evaluating being applied to speech enabled applications whether the application is running or not; receiving a representation of a spoken utterance, the spoken utterance including a command that is able to be associated with multiple applications, any subset of which may or may not be running; and directing the representation of the spoken utterance to a selected speech enabled application based upon results of the step of evaluating the contexts, wherein the command is applied to the selected speech enabled application including launching the selected speech enabled application as needed and performing function of the command.