An approach to abstracting the circuit switched nature of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) by using VoIP to provide voice actuated services is disclosed. By carrying a telephone call using VoIP technology for a short distance (frequently within a server room) significant benefits to call handling and capacity management can be obtained. Specifically, a PSTN-to-IP gateway is used to receive (and place) calls over the PSTN and route those calls internally to servers over an IP network in a packet switched format. A number of computer systems can receive and handle the calls in the IP format, including: translating the packets into an audio format suitable for speech recognition and creating suitable packets from computer sound files for transmission back over the PSTN.