The paper describes developments and
results of the work being carried out
during the European research project 
CATCH-2004 (Converse in AThens Cologne 
and Helsinki) . The objective of 
the project is multi-modal, 
multi-lingual conversational access 
to information systems. This paper 
concentrates on issues of the 
multilingual telephony-based speech 
and natural language understanding 
components.