In the EU funded IDAS project (LE4-8315), demonstrators providing an automated interactive telephone-based directory assistance service have been developed by ten partners from Germany, Greece, Spain and Switzerland [6]. In this paper we will focus in the Spanish demonstrator. In particular, we will describe the following aspects: The general architecture of the system, paying special attention to the speech recognition module. We will present new alternatives for the estimation of continuous HMMs and the agglomerative clustering of context-dependent units. The most common problems encountered in the development of this kind of systems and their operation in a real environment. Impressions, opinions and scores from real-world users of the system. Keywords: large vocabulary recognition, telephone-based, directory assistance service, dialog.