Nuance and ScanSoft Collaborate to Bring RealSpeak Text-to-Speech to Nuance Customers

PEABODY, MA and MENLO PARK, CA - Nuance (Nasdaq: NUAN) and ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) announced the companies have joined forces to extend their reach in the worldwide telephony market by bringing together the best in Nuance's speech software and ScanSoft's text-to-speech (TTS) offerings. ScanSoft has made its RealSpeak TTS engine fully compatible with the Nuance Vocalizer Integration Framework. This integration provides Nuance customers access to ScanSoft's comprehensive TTS product offering, currently available in 19 languages. Nuance will promote ScanSoft's RealSpeak TTS to its customer base and will offer solutions providing the widest language support with the highest quality and densities. "By working with ScanSoft, our customers and partners will be able to benefit from unparalleled breadth of language support," said Ron Croen, president and CEO of Nuance. "ScanSoft's high-quality TTS and our leading speech software provides customers with a comprehensive solution for use around the world. The integration allows customers to benefit from the scalability and reliability offered from Nuance's unique distributed architecture." "Customers of speech-based technologies have clearly shown a preference toward best-in-class software implementations," said Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO of ScanSoft. "The strategic relationship between Nuance and ScanSoft brings together the market's best speech recognition and TTS implementations for speech-based telephony applications. We look forward to working with Nuance to accelerate the global acceptance and use of these technologies." ScanSoft will support Nuance's worldwide sales team in its selling efforts as customers and channel partners expand their geographic opportunities.