A voice interaction system is configured to analyze an utterance and identify inherent attributes that are indicative of a demographic characteristic of the system user that spoke the utterance. The system then selects and presents a personalized response to the user, the response being selected based at least in part on the identified demographic characteristic. In one embodiment, the demographic characteristic is one or more of the caller's age, gender, ethnicity, education level, emotional state, health status and geographic group. In another embodiment, the selection of the response is further based on consideration of corroborative caller data.