SpeechWorks Delivers OpenSpeech Technologies, Optimized for Standards, Through Leading Platform Providers Worldwide.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 20, 2002

Proven Platforms, Combined with SpeechWorks Open, VoiceXML-Based Speech Technologies and Expertise, Offer Customers A Total Speech Solution

SpeechWorks International, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPWX), the global leader in speech technologies and services, today announced that its VoiceXML-optimized, OpenSpeech(TM) suite of products is now being embraced by more than 80 percent of leading ASP and IVR platform providers worldwide including Avaya, Comverse Network Systems, Convergys, Edify, Intervoice, Nortel Networks, VoiceGenie and West. During the last 16 months, SpeechWorks has introduced a suite of seven OpenSpeech products, built from the ground-up to optimize the performance of VoiceXML-based speech services. In that same period, the adoption of SpeechWorks' OpenSpeech technology has increased from approximately 33 percent to 83 percent, among leading ASP and platform providers (as described in the footnote below).

The OpenSpeech suite of products provides partners with open, standards-compliant speech technologies engineered for fast platform integration and superior performance on voice processing platforms. Working together, SpeechWorks and its network of leading platform providers offer organizations greater flexibility when selecting a cost-effective, total speech solution that leverages their existing Web and telephony technology investments and delivers a compelling return on investment while providing high caller satisfaction.

"SpeechWorks leading speech technologies, paired with our partners' extensive experience in speech platforms, middleware, back-end connectivity, and developer tools, deliver customers a complete speech solution," said Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer at SpeechWorks. "Partners have been a foundation for SpeechWorks' success, and the availability of our OpenSpeech technology on partner platforms that serve over 80 percent of the worldwide market is a significant achievement. The combined offer provides enterprise and carrier organizations with a broad range of speech applications, time-proven, scalable platform choices to deploy them on, and the international coverage required in today's global economy."

"Speech recognition can help companies improve customer satisfaction, improve productivity and reduce costs. Much of this value is determined by the design and implementation of the application. This business benefit also relies on the capabilities of the underlying platform - the choice of which depends on a wide array of factors specific to each implementation," said Dan Hawkins, Managing Analyst, Voice Business, Datamonitor. "By continuing to follow a partner-friendly approach, SpeechWorks is frequently able to offer its technologies and services in conjunction with the platform best suited to a particular project."

"SpeechWorks approach to delivering customers a complete speech solution through its network of platform partners enables the company to focus on enhancing its core technologies and ensuring that its partners continue to offer customers SpeechWorks' latest technology innovations," says Dr. William Meisel, president of TMA Associates and a leading speech industry analyst.

The OpenSpeech product line includes OpenSpeech Recognizer(TM), OpenSpeech Recognizer Client Server(TM), OpenSpeech MediaServer(TM), OpenSpeech DialogModules(TM), OpenSpeech Browser(TM) and OpenSpeech Insight(TM).

"SpeechWorks OpenSpeech product line and its speaker verification and text-to-speech technologies combined with the support for the VoiceXML 2.0 standard lets developers quickly deploy speech applications on the Avaya IVR platform," said Jim Smith, Avaya Vice President, CRM Solutions. "We continue to collaborate with SpeechWorks to expand the capabilities of our VoiceXML-based platform as our customers increasingly demand speech-enabled self-service applications based on open standards to access information and conduct transactions over the phone."

"Speech Recognition is a valuable component of any organization's successful 'Customer Engagement' strategy, and Nortel Networks has worked closely with SpeechWorks to incorporate its OpenSpeech open, standards-based speech technologies into our portfolio of advanced speech processing solutions," said Vickie Marvich, Vice President, Marketing, Nortel Networks Customer Contact and Voice Portal Solutions. "There is increasing demand for this technology, and by working with SpeechWorks we can continue to offer cost-effective solutions that leverage our speech application experience and deployment expertise with SpeechWorks leading speech technologies. And as VoiceXML is becoming increasingly important in the marketplace, SpeechWorks and its open source standards are an important part of our VoiceXML strategy."

"VoiceGenie has enjoyed a successful partnership with SpeechWorks, and we are committed to working together to accelerate the adoption of open, standards-based speech solutions that meet the demands of our growing customer lineup," said Stuart Berkowitz, President and CEO of VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. "In recent quarters, we have seen increased interest by carrier and enterprise organizations, including Ster-Kinekor, StarVoice and Simplex Grinnell to name a few, who are looking for powerful solutions that leverage SpeechWorks' leading speech technologies and that can be deployed in a hosted or premise-based environment."

Standards Support and Technology Innovation

SpeechWorks is a strong supporter of industry standards and open architectures that will ultimately accelerate the growth of the speech market. SpeechWorks is involved in the creation and on-going development of key industry standards such as VoiceXML, SALT, MRCP and Aurora that will allow the large developer community to quickly create and deploy quality speech applications for the enterprise and carrier markets. SpeechWorks is an active participant in the W3C and helped define the VoiceXML 2.0 specification. The Company developed its entire OpenSpeech suite of products to support the complete VoiceXML standard and will continue to support the latest revisions as the specification evolves.

The Company is also making an investment to accelerate the availability of its latest technological innovations on partner platforms. Through its Partner Optimization Program, SpeechWorks ensures that its partners can quickly access the latest enhancements to the OpenSpeech suite of products, which include:

OpenSpeech Recognizer Software: OpenSpeech Recognizer software is the industry's first speech recognition engine optimized for the VoiceXML 2.0 standard. SpeechWorks partners and customers can take advantage of its unique capabilities, including:

-- Patented, finite state transducer technology providing significant memory and CPU savings, supporting large dynamic grammars and vocabularies containing up to one million words;

-- Advanced grammar management with integrated URL fetching, compiling and caching, easing support for VoiceXML interpreters;

-- Parallel grammar support, simplifying application personalization;

-- Powerful segment-based acoustic modeling, providing higher recognition accuracy with less computation compared to more common Hidden Markov modeling techniques;

-- Flexible end-pointing algorithms with a wide range of sensitivity, ensuring high performance even for noisy environments such as speaker phones, automobiles, and mobile phones;

-- SMARTRecognizer(TM) technology, improving recognition accuracy by updating acoustic models, language models and pronunciations automatically through continuous feedback;

-- Support for ECMA scripting within grammars, allowing sophisticated grammatical constraints to influence n-best result scoring for better application usability.

OpenSpeech Recognizer Client Server Software: OpenSpeech Recognizer Client Server software provides the same industry-leading speech recognition as OpenSpeech Recognizer but in a high-performance client server architecture. Because both products share a common API, platform developers can switch between all-in-one and client server architectures for maximum scalability without recompilation. SpeechWorks is the only company to provide customers and partners with such complete flexibility in system architecture.

OpenSpeech MediaServer: OpenSpeech MediaServer software provides the same industry-leading speech recognition as OpenSpeech Recognizer software but is designed specifically for use in VoIP architectures. It is the industry's first speech recognition server that supports MRCP, an emerging standard for managing speech recognition servers in distributed systems. MRCP allows speech data to be routed directly to the media server, bypassing the application platform for increased performance and scalability.

OpenSpeech DialogModule Software: OpenSpeech DialogModules are the industry's first VoiceXML-based objects that package vocabularies, grammars and call flow logic for common dialog tasks to support rapid development of quality speech services. SpeechWorks' patented OpenSpeech DialogModules are invoked using the sub-dialog tag and execute on industry standard application servers to generate VoiceXML code, enabling them to work with most VoiceXML platforms. When deployed in conjunction with OpenSpeech Recognizer software, the combined solution takes advantage of advanced speech detection technologies that further improve accuracy and performance in wireless and noisy environments.

OpenSpeech Browser: OpenSpeech Browser software is the first toolkit that speeds development of high performance VoiceXML platforms by providing expertly crafted foundation components that are suitable for a wide variety of telephony platform architectures. OpenSpeech Browser software provides a VoiceXML interpreter and related components in source form for maximum flexibility and includes OpenSpeech Recognizer software and Speechify(TM) software, a natural sounding text-to-speech engine, to deliver a powerful caller experience.

OpenSpeech Insight: OpenSpeech Insight is the first speech application analysis tool designed to provide reporting through any Web browser for business, operational and developer needs. Using OpenSpeech Insight, SpeechWorks partners and customers can gain valuable insight into the performance of their speech services.

SpeechWorks also offers OpenVXI, the first open source VoiceXML Interpreter that supports the VoiceXML 2.0 standard. SpeechWorks designed OpenVXI to be integrated with speech recognition and TTS engines, telephony hardware and systems management. It allows developers to write applications without using proprietary extensions, allowing greater application portability and also supports the W3C speech recognition grammar format for easy application development. The software is available on the Carnegie Mellon website and over 2,540 developers have downloaded the software to date.

For more information on the OpenSpeech suite of products visit http://www.speechworks.com/products/speechrec/openspeech.cfm. To learn more about SpeechWorks' global partner network, visit http://www.speechworks.com/partners. For a free download of OpenVXI, visit http://fife.speech.cs.cmu.edu/openvxi/.

Footnote: These percentages are based on the platform providers represented in the Gartner Group 2002 IVR Magic Quadrant for North America and industry-leading platform providers Cisco, Comverse, Genesys, Microsoft and West. These percentages do not take into consideration other IVR and ASP providers.

About SpeechWorks

Organizations around the world trust SpeechWorks to manage their customer conversations. As the leading provider of speech technologies and services, SpeechWorks helps companies create and implement unique Speech Strategies that ensure maximum financial return and the highest levels of caller satisfaction. The Company provides speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) and speaker verification for network and embedded environments, including new multimodal devices with both an audio interface and visual display. SpeechWorks' customers include carriers, corporations and government organizations, such as America Online, Citibank Europe, CIBC Bank, IRS, Microsoft, and United Airlines. For more information, please call 617.428.4444 or visit www.speechworks.com.

OpenSpeech, OpenSpeech Recognizer, SMARTRecognizer, OpenSpeech Recognizer Client Server, OpenSpeech MediaServer, OpenSpeech DialogModules, OpenSpeech Browser, OpenSpeech Insight and Speechify are a trademark of SpeechWorks International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.