Yeah and the front of house software we're talking about probably plugs/will plug into multiple similar services. Voice isn't a good analog for unix's text piping because it has to go through encoding and decoding on each end and passes through the lossy phone lines and then through interpretation on top of all that.

Oh, I didn't mean it to be a perfect analogy, because nothing is. Text piping is fragile in other ways because it can be broken trivially by changing the order, formating, padding etc, in ways that voice isn't.