1. A method for presenting an application in a plurality of modalities, comprising the steps of: retrieving a modality-independent document from one of local and remote storage; parsing the modality-independent document using parsing rules obtained from one of local or remote storage; converting the modality-independent document to a first intermediate representation that can be rendered by a speech user interface modality; converting the modality-independent document to a second intermediate representation that can be rendered by a GUI (graphical user interface) modality; building a cross-reference table by which the speech user interface can access components comprising the second intermediate representation; rendering the first and second intermediate representations in their respective modality; and receiving a user input in one of the GUI and speech user interface modalities to enable multi-modal interaction and control the document presentation.