Asterisk and incoming calls for public art peice

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hi i am new to this world and need some help.
We are creating a public art piece where we need users to call in to a local number (front end) and we take the voice input from the user and recognize words to drive our server/database (backend).

My question is

  1. How do i tie an incoming phone number to Asterisk running on our server?
  2. and then can i use Asterisk do grab the voice input and send that to my voice recognition engine?
2

As a hint:

1- there are several DID providers that can help you with that, you may try myowntelco.net, callcentric.com, etc.
2- have a look at lumenvox.com