CanadianTelecommunications Provider Calls on Nuance

MENLO PARK, CA - Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) announced that Bell Canada has teamed with Nuance to voice-enable its 310-BELL customer service line. Designed to simplify the customer experience and increase caller satisfaction for its millions of residential customers, this voice-driven call steering application routes incoming customer calls to more than 70 customer care information channels, including live agents and underlying self-service applications. The highlight of the new system is "Emily," a custom designed speech recognition persona who acts as the greeter for callers and responds to customers' requests and queries by automatically routing the callers to the right 310-BELL information destination. Emily utilizes Nuance's Say Anything(TM) natural language speech recognition technology, uniquely suited to meet the requirements of Bell Canada's many phone-based customer care options. Say Anything allows callers to speak naturally while the system identifies key concepts in the spoken request to determine each caller's needs. "Speech is central to an integrated customer service strategy and it provides a natural way for Bell Canada to automate customer interactions with information and supplement other customer service channels such as the Internet," said Ron Croen, president, CEO and chairman, Nuance. "Nuance is delighted to be Bell Canada's speech solutions provider, bringing to bear our depth of technology, products and services to deliver on Bell Canada's vision for customer care." Bell Canada and Nuance teams closely collaborated on the development of the new Emily system, from concept to application design to testing and deployment. The project team met goals for scope, timeline and budget, and moved from project approval to pilot in less than six months. "In years to come we'll look back and see that Emily was one of the very important steps we took to bring simplicity to customers," said John Sheridan, president and COO, Bell Canada. "She's proof that technology can be used to make things easier for customers, not more complicated. Emily is a symbol of change for the company and its customers and we expect that she'll become the inspiration for re-inventing the ways in which we serve our customers." The Emily persona was custom developed by Bell Canada and Nuance Voice User Interface designers in order to create a unique personality for 310-BELL and extend Bell Canada brand attributes to the "voice" of its customer care center. Emily was designed for growth, and the speech-driven system can be expanded to accommodate the customer care requirements of all 310-BELL callers. The initial deployment of the enhanced 310-BELL system is underway in the province of Ontario, available to English speaking customers of Bell Canada's residential services. In the coming months, Bell Canada plans to gradually introduce Emily in phases throughout its entire service area. The system's back end applications are fully scalable to allow for broad expansion of the speech-driven services over time.