Type agnostic getter methods

I'm writing a client for a system that returns values of natural types in random order (some can be int, others float, others string [well, almost natural]). The problem is, I don't know what type a value will be at compile time.

Since I don't know the type of the value to be returned until after the remote system has been queried, what is the best way to provide a uniform interface that allows a user of the client library to extract the value in the right type?

If querying the remote system once returns a string, I'd like my get_value() to return a string. If an int, make it return an int. Alternatively, how to have the client library call the getter with the right type?

I guess templates with type hinting would be a good way to achieve this?