Patent ID: 7103156

Claim:
A voice server for hosting telephony services comprising: a gateway for processing a telephone call, wherein said gateway: separates inbound telephony signaling events from audio information, and combines outbound telephony signaling events with audio information; a real-time streaming engine, wherein said engine: sends inbound audio data to a speech recognition engine for converting said audio information to text, and receives outbound audio data from a text-to-speech system that synthesizes said audio information from text; a stack interface configured to exchange telephony signaling information on a stack with one of a circuit-switched to packet-switched interface coupled to said gateway; a consolidation processor for sending and receiving telephony signaling events on said stack to a core processor, wherein said core processor directs said audio information to one or more speech processing systems and one or more core clients in response to said telephony signaling events; a plurality of core clients, each having a call model stored therein, wherein each said core client is configured to select and execute at least one voice service associated with a call, wherein said core client processes text, said text representing said audio information that is communicated to and from said voice service; a speech processing system containing said speech recognition engine and said text-to-speech engine configured to convert speech to text and to convert text to speech for processing said call; and a core processor configured to distribute said telephony signaling information to said core clients and coordinate operation of said core clients and said speech processing system based on a bandwidth capacity of said core processor, wherein said core processor exchanges telephony signaling information with said circuit-switched to packet-switched interface via said stack interface.