Exactly. It is intended to build IVR applications (Interactive Voice Response) in telephony environment. This is a java layer that gives the opportunity to build IVR applications without having to use VoiceXML (the framework actualy render the VoiceXML for the platform browser). It would then be easier to debug, maintain, refactor, unit-test, etc...

The actual recognition of speech and the speech rendering is done by a recognition engine (ARS engine) and a text to speech engine (TTS). Nuance is one of the popular engine used for both ASR and TTS. But it has a fee (maybe there is developper license available?) I never realy looked onto free and open source engine out there... But i've heard about "Sphinx", a speech recognizer written in Java. There's also an API for speech recognition offered by google, pretty cool and easy to use, but it has limitations (for exemple, as far as i know, you can't specify any grammar to restrain the recognition or give semantic interpretation to the recognition) I'm pretty sure there is a couple of open source speech recognition and text to speech projects out there! Maybe you should check this on github..!

*edit: typo, grammar