1. A method of controlling an electronic interactive conversational agent comprising the steps of: a) forming a communications link between a client device and a server system; b) presenting the electronic interactive conversational agent in a form perceptible to a user of the client device; c) soliciting speech utterance data from the user of the device using the electronic interactive conversational agent; d) performing one or more speech recognition operations on said speech utterance data to generate a recognized speech statement; e) controlling the electronic interactive conversational agent to communicate a natural language voiced response to the recognized speech statement generated by the server system; wherein the electronic interactive conversational agent is adapted to mimic behavior of a human agent through a native language dialog session conducted with the user.