Dejima Receives Patent for Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Platform; New Technology Marks Evolutionary Leap in Natural Interaction.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 2001

Dejima, Inc. announced today that it has received a general patent with 31 claims for its agent-oriented software engineering platform that marks an evolutionary leap in natural interaction technology, surpassing current technologies such as grammar-based platforms used in speech recognition products.

Dejima is using the patented technology as the core component in its natural interaction products, including Dejima Direct for CRM, financial, and mobile markets. Dejima customers can use the products to design and improve user interaction for any device or application. Dejima's customers reduce support expenses and increase usability by giving end users direct, immediate, and natural access to information, fundamentally changing the way they communicate and access services and applications. Dejima Direct also helps reduce the learning curve for new users and offers greater access to functionality for power-users by providing intelligent interactions and dialogues.

Dejima's newly patented technology helps customers realize such benefits by allowing their software and application developers to create agent-oriented user interaction programs that enable end users to communicate naturally and comfortably with technology-based products. Agent-oriented programs achieve advanced levels of natural interaction by assigning agents to carry out specific functions within domain-specific environments. These agents, working together and across disciplines, map the user's intent, and intelligently respond to requests and commands. Dejima's agent-oriented technology signals a departure from object-oriented technology that has historically driven, and limited, user interaction technologies.

According to Babak Hodjat, Dejima's co-founder and chief executive officer, this claim-based technology is a perfect solution for the problem of modeling application functionality and mapping user intentions to such functionality in a coherent, easy to implement, and distributed manner. Hodjat developed Dejima's agent-oriented, patented technology after working for years in the artificial intelligence and machine learning fields, searching for more human ways to interface with technology.

"We are excited to receive this patent for Dejima's core technology, which we believe is light years ahead of other natural interaction solutions, incorporated in speech recognition and grammar-based alternatives," Hodjat said. "I believe companies can not achieve true human-like interaction without an architecture such as Dejima's."

About Dejima, Inc.

Dejima is a privately held global company founded in 1998 with offices in San Jose (headquarters), London and Tokyo. Dejima's patented platform enables companies to provide end users easy ways to interact with technology. Dejima Natural Interaction (DNI) enables developers and solution integrators to create a natural user interface -- a bridge between what end users want and the sophisticated applications and databases they are trying to access. The basis of Dejima's patented technology is an agent-oriented software engineering methodology that breaks up complex software into a community of simpler, collaborating, message-driven components. Interface solutions built with DNI are more successful because they focus on the user's intent, not on input accuracy or grammar compliance. For more information on Dejima and our technology, please visit http://www.dejima.com.