Philips Speech Processing Delivers Voice-Activated Directory Assistance Applications to Telcos; Philips Tapped by Six Additional Carriers to Automate and Improve Service - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, May 22, 2000

Philips Speech Processing, a leading developer of speech recognition technology, Thursday announced the results of its recent activity in the market for voice-activated directory assistance applications for telecom service providers.

According to the company, six far-reaching agreements have been recently signed to provide directory assistance automation applications to major carriers on three continents. These customers join Philips' roster of customers that have previously deployed directory assistance applications such as number look-up and call completion, including Ameritech, Bell South, AT&T Canada, Bell Canada, the Dominican Republic Telecom, New Zealand Telecom and others. "Our customers in the directory assistance space, both new and established, illustrate our leadership and market dominance in this application," said Peter Foster, executive vice president of Philips Speech Processing.

One new customer, Portugal Telecom, will equip more than 1,000 ports in its call center operations with Philips speech recognition technology -- speech enabling its comprehensive range of services from directory assistance to calling card validation, to call completion and other value added offerings. The other new design wins, including a major U.S. carrier, are in various stages of deployment and testing and will be announced in the coming months.

"Speech-enabled directory assistance meets two goals for carriers: it improves customer service and it reduces the expenses associated with handling millions of inquiries by human operators," said Mr. Foster. "One customer -- that has completed a successful market trial in three cities -- has told us that in their analysis of this speech-enabled service, they'll reduce, on average, the number of seconds for each directory assistance call and slash operating expenses annually by the equivalent of $1,500,000 for each second saved."

With Philips' natural speech recognition technology, telecom service providers can create automated information and transaction systems that provide directory services with a human touch. Users can request information naturally from the system, which listens to the caller, interprets the content and context of their request, and provides an appropriate response. If requests are unclear, the system will prompt the user for more detailed information or transfer the call directly to an operator. The method of using a human operator to support unclear requests is covered under Philips' U.S. patent numbers 5,033,088 and 5,745,877.

The automation of directory assistance is an immense market that includes the subcategories of white pages, yellow pages and call completion services. Industry research firm the Kelsey Group estimates that telecom companies worldwide collectively receive more than 516 million directory assistance calls per month.

Directory assistance applications are based on SpeechPearl, Philips' leading-edge speech recognition and natural language understanding engine, which is currently available in 20 languages. Because SpeechPearl is a host-based recognizer that supports very large vocabularies, up to 200,000 words per active lexicon, it is especially suited for telecommunications applications.

Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics, is a pioneer and global leader in speech recognition, natural dialogue and language understanding technologies, with more than 40 years experience in the development and marketing of speech products. Philips offers a broad portfolio of speech technology solutions to the telecommunications, IT, automotive and consumer electronics industries. As a developer and provider of speech technologies in multiple languages, Philips has the largest installed base of speech recognition and natural language understanding systems in Europe, and is a large and growing provider of speech technology in North America and other regions of the world. Installations include call center services automation, telephony applications, professional dictation solutions, voice controlled devices and Internet applications. Visit www.speech.philips.com for additional information.

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of $33.5 billion (EUR 31.5 billion) in 1999. It is a global leader in color television sets, lighting, electric shavers, color picture tubes for televisions and monitors, and one-chip TV products. Its 226,900 employees in more than 60 countries are active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors, medical systems, and IT services (Origin). Philips is quoted on the New York (NYSE:PHG), London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and other stock exchanges. News from Philips is located at www.news.philips.com.