18. A speech-enabled internet based computing system comprising: a speech recognition engine configured to generate a recognized speech query from an utterance; said speech recognition engine being further configured to distribute speech processing operations between a client device and a server device on a device-by-device basis, such that a plurality of client devices having differing computing capabilities can be supported; wherein individual ones of said plurality of client devices can be configured to perform at least part of said speech processing operations to generate said recognized speech query; a web page having a search engine adapted to generate a search query in response to said recognized speech query to locate a list of items; wherein content for at least some of said list of items can be retrieved through a browser on said client device based on said search query; wherein speech related data for the web page can be transferred between the client and server device using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and a format which includes an embedded NULL character.
18. A speech-enabled internet based computing system comprising: a speech recognition engine configured to generate a recognized speech query from an utterance; said speech recognition engine being further configured to distribute speech processing operations between a client device and a server device on a device-by-device basis, such that a plurality of client devices having differing computing capabilities can be supported; wherein individual ones of said plurality of client devices can be configured to perform at least part of said speech processing operations to generate said recognized speech query; a web page having a search engine adapted to generate a search query in response to said recognized speech query to locate a list of items; wherein content for at least some of said list of items can be retrieved through a browser on said client device based on said search query; wherein speech related data for the web page can be transferred between the client and server device using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and a format which includes an embedded NULL character. 21. The system of claim 18 , further including a query/answer routine adapted to transmit said speech based query over a communications channel in response to a button being pressed on the client device.