27. A system for dynamic adjustment of audio prompts in response to a users interaction modality with a communications device having a multimodal interface comprising a speech interface for accessing a speech recognizer and another interface, comprising: means for determining the mode of user input modality and selecting a corresponding one of a foreground state and a background state of the speech interface.
28. A system according to claim 27 wherein the foreground state of the speech interface provides audio prompts comprising one of speech prompts, earcons, and earcons and speech prompts, and provides full speech based error recovery, and in the background mode of the speech interface provides audio prompts comprising earcons replacing speech prompts, and provides no speech based error recovery.