BCB Chairman Comments On Licensing Of Voiceflow Software To Lernout & Hauspie In 3-Year Global Non-Exclusive Agreement.

Business Editors

MARKHAM, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 31, 2000

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. (NASDQ:LHSP) today announced that it has entered into a licensing agreement with BCB Voice Systems Inc. (CDNX:BIV.).

The agreement, on a perpetual, non-exclusive and global basis, provides Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) with source code for BCB's VoiceFLOW digital recording and voice management software. In return, L&H has made an initial payment to BCB, with additional licensing fees and royalties to be paid to BCB, based on L&H sales of products incorporating VoiceFLOW, over the next 3 years.

Terry Graham, Chairman and CEO of BCB, said "This agreement will help ensure that VoiceFLOW, which is already used by thousands of end users at medical installations worldwide, continues to set a new standard for voice capture and management."

Graham pointed out that the unique way in which VoiceFLOW captures, digitizes, compresses, indexes, routes, stores and retrieves voice files, positions it to become the software of choice for moving audio files across local and wide area networks as well as the Internet. The immediate benefit is that voice can be captured and stored as small digital files, and then shared over any network without degradation to that network's performance. Furthermore, being able to move these compressed audio files across the Internet significantly reduces long distance phone charges for regional, cross-country or international distribution of voice-based information. BCB was the first dictation systems vendor to offer end-users the ability to treat voice as a distinct data element that can be moved over any network, stored in a database and linked to other related data such as text and images.

Belgium-based L&H, who currently holds a 12.5% stake in BCB, is one of the largest and most established vendors of voice software in the world. Last March, L&H acquired both Dictaphone Corporation of Stratford Conn., a privately held leader in dictation and telephony call center recording systems and solutions, and Dragon Systems Inc. of Newton, Mass., a privately held leader in speech and language technology.

Additionally today BCB announced that it has received receipts from the Ontario and British Columbia Securities Commissions for a (final) prospectus qualifying the distribution of Common Shares and Share Purchase Warrants issuable upon the exercise of 1,901,962 Special Warrants previously issued by the Corporation at a price of $2.55 per Special Warrant. Subject to adjustment, each Special Warrant entitles the holder to receive one Common Share and one Share Purchase Warrant.

Each Share Purchase Warrant, when issued, will entitle the holder to receive one Common Share of the Corporation at a price of $2.95 per share at any time on or before October 3, 2001.

Thomson Kernaghan & Co. Ltd. acted as agent for the Corporation in connection with the private placement of the Special Warrants.

BCB currently provides commercially accepted applications in the Court and Healthcare markets whose functions include the capture, compression, storage, retrieval, routing and text annotation of voice. BCB intends to call a special meeting of shareholders in early October to seek approval to change the Company's name from BCB Voice Systems to VoiceIQ.

"The proposed name change will more clearly reflect our mission of bringing intelligent conversational computing to a broad number of markets," said Terry Graham, Chairman and CEO of BCB. "We've evolved beyond our core applications and are transcending the limitations of current speech development tools. We're doing this through the delivery of a complete voice-operating platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to enable secure voice-driven transactions, sophisticated internet and database searches, and data mining applications - such as fraud detection - within mobile, desktop, telephony, handheld and e-commerce environments. The architecture of the platform will be open standard based and include published specifications in order to encourage rapid market adoption by Telecommunication Operators, OEMs, ASPs, ISPs, Financial Institutions and Governments."

The Canadian Venture Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the information herein.