22. The interactive speech system of claim 17 , wherein said speech-based query is composed of a list of candidate queries which are concatenated.
17. A network based interactive speech system adapted for responding to speech-based queries concerning a set of topic entries, the system comprising: a speech recognition engine adapted to generate recognized speech utterance data from speech data associated with a speech-based query from a speaker concerning one of the set of topic entries; a first routine executing on a server system and adapted to perform natural language processing on said recognized speech utterance data to identify a selected set of phrases related to the set of topic entries; a second routine executing on the server system and adapted to convert said selected set of phrases from the first routine into a search query suitable for identifying a first group of one or more topic entries corresponding to said speech-based query; wherein words and/or phrases in said search query can be assigned different weightings determined by said first routine from said recognized speech utterance data; a third routine executing on the server system adapted to evaluate said first group of one or more topic entries and to identify a single topic entry responsive to said speech-based query; wherein third routine can consider words and/or phrases in said search query which are not in said set of topic entries; and wherein information corresponding to a single topic entry taken from said first group can be determined and presented in real-time by the interactive speech system automatically as a response best matching said speech-based query; and a second server system adapted to assist with a response to said speech-based query, such that said speech based query is recognized at the server system, and multiple databases at different server systems linked to the server system can be considered in responding to queries for said set of topic entries, wherein a database at said second server system can be considered for said response to said speech-based query when said server system cannot satisfy a desired confidence level required for said response.