Data exchange involves the following:
Applications on the IR system can define database tables and place content from them into database table fields.
When a caller inputs touchtones, the content of the response is placed into a system variable. It can also be placed into custom variables.
When a caller speaks, speech recognition software converts the voice into data (see Detecting speech). This data is analyzed by the speech recognition servers and the relevant parts are extracted. This data is also place into variables.
Applications on the IR system can retrieve data from database tables.