central office 20 and a local area network lan 50 is used to connect the vrus 30 to a gaming portion 32 of gaming system 10 by connecting lan 50 behind vrus 30 instead of connecting a private branch exchange pbx 24 in front of vrus 30 the number of connection ports and therefore the amount of hardware needed for processing assistance requests is greatly reduced for example having pbx 24 connect in front of a 5000 port vru 30 would require pbx 24 to have 10000 ports instead with lan 50 behind vrus 30 only 100 ports lines are needed pbx 24 may be separately connected between central office 20 and a live agent 23 to provide a live attendant to a customer who needs assistance the operation for live assistance requests will be described further below lan 52 provides control signals to vrus 30 from business server 34 or gaming servers 38 40 42 or 44 vrus 30 receive subscriber entered data from a telephone keypad for example in the form of dtmf tones and send converted signals to business server 34 or gaming servers 38 40 42 or 44 vrus 30 respond to the subscriber entered data from a telephone with audio responses which are sent over the telephone system and heard by telephone speaker if a pc is used audio signals are sent via the internet to run u201c wav u201d files.