The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. The efficiency of speech recognition. O.K., so that third one isn't a phrase that's too familiar to fans of Olympic competition, but given the success of speech recognition-driven applications at this year's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City perhaps it should be. Not only was this year's Winter Olympics the site of exciting competition among world-class athletes, it was also the site of an extremely successful voice application that will probably be remembered by visitors as clearly as many of the Olympics' most exciting moments.

In July of 2000, the FCC officially reserved the number "511" as the single, nationwide number for traveler information. Similar to dialing "411" for directory assistance or "911" for emergencies, in the future you will be able to dial "511" and get automated, real-time information on things like traffic, road conditions and public transportation. The State of Utah is one of the first in the country to take advantage of this new service.

In December of 2001, Utah's Department of Transportation (UDOT) debuted the country's first "511" service, but decided to take the service a step further. With the Winter Olympics just around the corner, Utah officials decided that "511" services would be the perfect solution for providing visitors with easy access to information about how to get to the games, traffic conditions around the various events, driving directions, and information such as event schedules, up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The only thing left was to determine the easiest way to deliver this information to the thousands of visitors who descended on Salt Lake City. Enter speech recognition.

The UDOT was given responsibility for the implementation of the state's "511" service. Since Salt Lake City would be drawing visitors and media attention from around the world, UDOT came up with two criteria for its "511" service. First, it had to be state-of-the-art. This was Utah's opportunity to showcase Salt Lake City to the world and they wanted the world to see Salt Lake City at its best. Second, the implementation date had to be adhered to. Whoever implemented the program would have to be, like so many Olympic athletes, speedy and accurate.

The State of Utah did its own independent research, collecting data regarding communications, and concluded that the telephone is still the most personal and desirable way for people to communicate. They further concluded that speech recognition was state-of-the-art in voice communications and would be deployed for the "511" services. UDOT decided upon a network-based speech-driven "511" service rather than a premise solution. The vendor chosen to implement this Olympic class speech-recognition application was Tellme Networks Inc. of Mountain View, CA.

UDOT also decided to add information regarding the location of Olympic events, driving directions, parking information and public transportation alternatives to its "511" service. Tellme engineers were given three months to design the application, test it and launch it in order to meet the start date of the first event. Definitely a challenge of Olympic proportions!

Tellme had the advantage of experience in dealing with diversity in dialects and accents due to the fact that its network is shared among its clients, so much of the fine tuning that would be required to accommodate the diverse languages and accents of Salt Lake City's visitors had already been done. They also knew that the performance of speech recognition would differ when callers used wireless phones rather than landline phones.

Like the Olympics themselves, Utah's speech recognition-based "511" service was launched on time, and without a hitch. Over the course of the competition, callers with a myriad of foreign and regional accents accessed information from their cell phones and landline phones with only a very small percentage opting to "zero out" to a call center agent. A success of Olympic proportions!

For those of you who are still hesitant to launch speech recognition-based applications in your call center, think about the magnitude of Utah's "511" Olympic services and the resulting success. Just like Olympic television coverage itself, speech recognition is definitely "ready for prime time."