Three Decades of Innovation in Voice Technology and Telecommunications (Hugo)

Since only one caller per episode earns the coveted contestant status - and to keep costs manageable for Hugo's fans - that person is called back by the Hugo team and gets to compete for the grand prize. To do so, callers must guide the animated character Hugo past tricky obstacles at the press of a button and ultimately save his family - all live, over the phone, during the broadcast.

To make sure the excitement wasn't limited to the few callers who got to play live, all callers were given the chance to leave their name and contact details in a structured format on a CreaLog portal. They were then automatically entered into a drawing for attractive consolation prizes. The large volume of address data collected could subsequently also be used for the broadcaster's marketing activities.

Celebrity hosts

Behind the scenes, a crew of 30 staff coordinates technology, cameras, callers, games, and prizes. Hosts on the team include Sonja Zietlow and Minh-Khai Phan-Thi, among others. Both went on to make the leap from Hugo into the wider world of show business. Hugo himself ran, surfed, and swam through 674 episodes of the Hugo Show until 1997 - and is still active on the web, as the fan club's pages show: www.hugoswelt.de .

More information on Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hugo_Show

From the 1995 voice computer to today's mass voting platform

The Hugo system is one of the early forerunners of today's mass voting platforms, which are still used for voting in current entertainment shows such as the ESC. Back then, the system already handled 250,000 calls in 30 minutes; today, the CreaLog Mass Voting platform manages a multiple of that for Swisscom: during televote and call-in campaigns by Swiss TV and radio stations, several hundred thousand calls and SMS messages are processed within the short time windows of the broadcasts. To put it more plainly: during live televoting operations, the platform handles around 1,400 new calls per second!

Details on a current televoting solution can be found here:

Case Study Swisscom Televote