Voice processing system

A voice processing system 30 is connected to a switch 20 via multiple telephone lines 25, and provides a set of line objects 335, each line object being associated with one of the physical telephone lines. The line object allows a demarcation to be made between the underlying voice processing system software 335, and external business applications 310. Thus a line object supports a set of methods such as Get DTMF Tone, Play Audio, Answer call, and End call, to allow the external business applications 310 to perform desired operations on a telephone line. These methods are invoked via a set of corresponding IVR action objects 320, which in turn are integrated into the business application. The business application itself, and its IVR actions, regard the line objects effectively as servers to provide IVR functionality. The business application may therefore run partially or completely on a separate physical machine from the IVR system itself.