  In general, self help systems are being increasingly deployed by service
based industries because they are capable of delivering better customer service
and increasingly the switch is to voice based self help systems because they
provide a natural interface for a human to interact with a machine. A speech
based self help system ideally needs a speech recognition engine to convert
spoken speech to text and in addition a language processing engine to take care
of any misrecognitions by the speech recognition engine. Any off-the-shelf
speech recognition engine is generally a combination of acoustic processing and
speech grammar. While this is the norm, we believe that ideally a speech
recognition application should have in addition to a speech recognition engine
a separate language processing engine to give the system better performance. In
this paper, we discuss ways in which the speech recognition engine and the
language processing engine can be combined to give a better user experience.
