NMS Communications Joins World Wide Web Consortium.

Business/Technology Editors

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2001

Company Strengthens its Voice Web Technology Leadership with

Participation in Industry's Leading Organization for Leveraging the

Full Potential of the Web

NMS Communications (NASDAQ: NMSS), the leading supplier of technology for tomorrow's networks, today announced that it has joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry organization dedicated to leading the technical evolution of the Web. The W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor, to develop common protocols that promote the growth and ensure interoperability of the Web. In just more than five years, the W3C has developed ,more than 35 technical specification for the Web's infrastructure and has expanded to over 517 members - including NMS Communications.

NMS will be closely involved in the Consortium's standards promotion, development and implementation activities through voting rights within the W3C Advisory Committee, participation in the organization's Interest Groups, Working Groups and Workshops, and through accessing the Consortium's members-only Web site for updates on news, technologies, developments and events.

Currently, the W3C is working to expand access to the Web to allow people to interact with Web sites via spoken commands, and through listening to prerecorded speech, music and synthetic speech. This will allow any telephone to be used to access Web-based services, and will be beneficial to people with visual impairments or to those needing Web access while keeping their hands and eyes free for other activities. It will also enable effective interaction with display-based Web content in cases where a mouse and keyboard may be missing or inconvenient to use.

The W3C recently issued a first public Working Draft of VoiceXML 2.0, a voice dialog markup language designed to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. VoiceXML 2.0 is designed to create audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and touch tone key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed-initiative conversations.

The VoiceXML 2.0 Working Draft was issued after plans were announced for cooperation between W3C and the VoiceXML Forum - another group in which NMS is a member - through a jointly signed Memorandum of Understanding. Earlier work on VoiceXML was completed within the VoiceXML Forum. Now the W3C and the VoiceXML Forum have agreed that W3C is to serve as the organization for VoiceXML technical development, while the VoiceXML Forum will continue to work as an advocate for Voice XML technologies adoption.

The following lists a few of the NMS Communications partners and customers that are also W3C members, and support NMS' award-winning voice platforms within their own VoiceXML developer environments:

--BeVocal - Its BeVocal Cafe is a voice developer site providing a VoiceXML interpreter, written entirely in Java, with many pre-tuned grammars and professional audio - including nationwide U.S. street addresses.

--Nuance - Offers graphical VoiceXML development tools, a Voice Site Staging Center for rapid prototyping and testing, and a VoiceXML-based voice browser to developers at no cost.

--Tellme - Its Tellme Studio allows anyone to develop their own voice applications and access them over the phone just by providing a URL to content. The Tellme Networks voice service is built entirely with VoiceXML.

"Becoming a member of the W3C is an important step for NMS," said Brian Demers, vice president and general manager of the New Network Solutions business unit at NMS Communications. "Our membership will help strengthen the capabilities we provide within our best-in-class voice platforms, applications and media servers. We look forward to working closely with our partners, customers and the Consortium to add value to and move forward the goals of the W3C in enhancing the potential of the Web."

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT LCS) in the USA, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology. To date, over 510 organizations are Members of the Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

About NMS Communications

NMS Communications (NASDAQ: NMSS) strives to lead in the design, development and distribution of hardware and software for the communications industry's most advanced solutions. Using NMS products and services, the world's leading networking and telecommunications suppliers get their solutions to market faster, and at lower costs.

NMS supplies the essential technologies for network-based IP media services, voice Web applications, speech-driven enterprise solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM), and packet voice and broadband access services, including voice over IP (VoIP), voice over DSL (VoDSL) and voice over wireless local loop (VoWLL).

NMS Communications: Technology for Tomorrow's Networks. Visit www.nmscommunications.com for more information.

NMS Communications is a trademark of NMS Communications Corporation. All other product or corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.