Nuance Ships Delivers Software Platform Optimized for Speech Solutions

MENLO PARK, CA - Nuance (Nasdaq:NUAN) announced the immediate availability of Nuance Voice Platform, an open, standards-based software platform optimized for speech solutions. TELUS, the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, has recently selected Nuance Voice Platform as the foundation for its new carrier grade speech solutions. Z-Tel Technologies, a provider of local, long distance and enhanced telecommunications services, has also chosen Nuance Voice Platform. They join more than 200 companies in 24 countries, including GE Polymerland, Georgia Technology Authority, Japan Telecom, National Express, Wells Fargo and WorldCom, who have used Nuance's VoiceXML platforms to deliver speech solutions aimed at maximizing cost savings and customer satisfaction. Nuance Voice Platform offers a range of speech specific capabilities, including a real-time Return on Investment (ROI) measurement and reporting tool. With the ROI Tracker(TM), Nuance Voice Platform monitors speech system performance in real-time, providing business managers with a view of the effectiveness of their customer care initiatives and the intelligence needed to make strategic business decisions. The ROI Tracker measures and reports the system's cost-saving or revenue-generating performance against specific success metrics defined during the early phases of the speech application planning process. This information is accessible as part of the Nuance Management Station, a key element of the Nuance Voice Platform, which provides comprehensive and centralized Web-based administration, monitoring, reporting, analysis and tuning. "Tracking ROI is one of the best ways for enterprises to measure the value of their speech solutions. For instance, using speech, Nuance customers such as British Airways have been able to reduce call center costs by up to 95%, realizing 100% ROI in as little as six months," said John Shea, vice president, Product Marketing and Management, Nuance. "With Nuance Voice Platform, organizations can employ the ROI Tracker to quickly and easily track their own cost savings in real-time." Additional key advantages of Nuance Voice Platform include: -- Support for industry standards: Nuance Voice Platform supports VoiceXML 2.0 -- the open, industry standard for voice applications and services. Because VoiceXML is based on Web architectures, businesses using Nuance Voice Platform can leverage their existing IT staff expertise and Web infrastructure investments. -- Ready access to advanced speech technologies: Integrated with Nuance's speech technologies, Nuance Voice Platform provides customers and partners access to advances in speech recognition accuracy and text-to-speech as well as technologies such as Nuance Say Anything (natural language technology,) Speak as One (recorded prompt and text-to-speech smoothing technology,) Accuburst (system optimization technology) Verifier (biometric voice authentication capabilities.) -- Development of voice applications: The Nuance application creation and deployment environment enables developers of different backgrounds and skill levels to build speech systems. Developers who are familiar with Web centric programming technologies and languages such as Java can use Nuance V-Builder 2.0 NVP Edition. For developers who prefer an integrated development environment (IDE) comparable to that of traditional IVR platforms, Nuance has partnered with Audium to offer its Audium 3 product suite. -- Reliability, scalability and system availability: the Nuance Voice Platform has been designed to support high-volume, mission critical voice-driven services as required by demanding enterprise and telecom applications. The patented Nuance Distributed Software Architecture provides load balancing and fault tolerance of the speech resources, and the platform leverages the proven performance of the most robust and widely deployed application servers on the market today such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Tomcat, to provide load balancing and automatic fail-over of the voice application. This architecture helps to ensure system uptime required for mission critical voice-driven services. -- Cost-effective systems integration: Nuance Voice Platform leverages application server architectures to facilitate integration with a range of call center and back-end infrastructures. Packaged interfaces are available to over 50 different applications and technologies ranging from Siebel to legacy mainframe systems. Nuance Voice Platform is designed to enable rapid integration to computer telephony environments from companies such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesys.