1. A method of determining the status of an answered telephone during the course of an outbound telephone call comprising: A. placing, with an automated calling system, a telephone call to a location having a telephone number at which a target person is listed; B. after said telephone call being answered, as determined by an initial spoken response, or other audio or telecommunication signals, initiating a prerecorded greeting which asks for the target person; C. receiving a spoken response from an answering person or other audio signal and determining if said spoken response or other audio signal is being provided by an answering machine; D. upon determining that the spoken response or other audio signal is not provide by an answering machine, performing a speaker-independent speech recognition analysis on said spoken response, wherein performing said speaker-independent speech recognition analysis includes initiating a speaker-independent speech recognition application with said target person, wherein the speaker-independent speech recognition application is an interactive speech application configured and arranged to provide a series of acoustic prompts to the answering person by telephonic interaction, to determine the meaning of said spoken response; and E. providing at least one of the following conditional responses based on the meaning of the subsequent spoken response as determined by the speaker-independent speech recognition analysis in accordance with a set of speaker-independent speech recognition enabled states of conversation including (1) the answering person indicates that he or she is the target person, (2) the answering person indicates that he or she is not the target person, (3) the answering person indicates that the target person is not present at the location, (4) the answering person indicates a hold request, (5) the answering person requests the identity of the caller, (6) the answering person indicates that the telephone number is not the correct number for the target person, and (7) the speaker-independent speech recognition analysis cannot determine the meaning of the spoken response from the answering person: a. if said speech recognition analysis determines that said spoken response is a request for the identity of the entity responsible for the calling system, initiating a prerecorded response indicating the identity of the calling party, repeating said prerecorded greeting which asks for the target person, and repeating step C through step E; and b. if said speech recognition analysis cannot determine a status of said spoken response, repeating said prerecorded greeting which asks for the target person, and repeating step C through step E; and F. responding appropriately to the results of the speech recognition analysis.