1. A speech understanding system comprising: a language model comprising a combination of an N-gram language model and a context-free grammar language model, the language model storing information related to words and semantic information to be recognized; a module adapted to receive input from a user and capture the input for processing, the module being further adapted to receive SALT application program interfaces pertaining to recognition of the input, the module configured to process the SALT application program interfaces and the input to ascertain semantic information pertaining to a first portion of the input and output a semantic object comprising text and semantic information for the first portion by accessing the language model, wherein performing recognition and outputting the semantic object are performed while capturing continues for subsequent portions of the input.