DISTRIBUTED VOICE WEB ARCHITECTURE AND ASSOCIATED COMPONENTS AND METHODS

A speech-enabled distributed processing system forming a Voice Web includes a gateway, one or more voice content sites coupled to the gateway over a wide area network, and a browser coupled to the gateway over a network, which may or may not be the wide area network. The gateway receives telephone calls from one or more users over telephony connections and performs endpointing of speech of each user. The browser provides the gateway with information enabling the gateway to selectively direct the endpointed speech to a voice content site via the wide area network. The gateway outputs the endpointed speech in the form of application protocol requests onto the wide area network to the appropriate site, as specified by the browser, or to the browser. The gateway receives prompts in the form of application protocol responses from the browser or a voice content site and plays the prompts to the appropriate user over the telephony connection. While accessing a selected voice content site, the gateway reroutes the endpointed speech to the browser if the endpointing result represents a hotword candidate.