Advocate is a lightweight and easy-to-use computing architecture that supports real-time, voice-oriented computing. It is designed to allow the combination of multiple speech and language processing components to create cohesive distributed applications. It is scalable, supporting local processing of all NLP/speech components when sufficient processing resources are available to one machine, or fully distributed/networked processing over an arbitrarily large compute structure when more compute resources are needed. Advocate is designed to operate in a large distributed test-bed in which an arbitrary number of NLP/speech services interface with an arbitrary number of Advocate clients applications. In this configuration, each Advocate client application employs automatic service discovery, calling them as required.