10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the voice server component is the only component of the application server that directly interacts with a speech server, wherein the IVR application conveys voice processing requests to the voice server, which handles the voice processing requests using one or more speech servers external to the application server, wherein said speech servers provide text-to-speech and speech-to-text operations for SIP based telephony sessions.
10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the voice server component is the only component of the application server that directly interacts with a speech server, wherein the IVR application conveys voice processing requests to the voice server, which handles the voice processing requests using one or more speech servers external to the application server, wherein said speech servers provide text-to-speech and speech-to-text operations for SIP based telephony sessions. 11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the external speech server is a media resource control protocol (MRCP) compliant server.