Quintus Teams with Unisys for Natural Language Understanding and Customer Service Solutions; Technology partnership to yield industry's most advanced customer interaction paradigm

Business Wire, July 2, 1996

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 2, 1996--Quintus Corporation, a provider of software solutions for the customer driven enterprise today announced that, as a part of a cooperative technology partnership, Unisys Corporation has embedded Quintus expert technology into its advanced voice recognition and natural language understanding product, Natural Language Assistant.

NL Assistant goes beyond mere speech recognition, with context-sensitivity and a rules-based engine that enables an application to engage in a dialogue with a user. With NL Assistant, applications can understand a verbal conversation over the telephone, or a typed message over the Internet.

"Quintus is the perfect fit for Unisys' Natural Language Assistant Program. Quintus has earned a loyal customer base and tremendous respect from the industry for their commitment to provide a complete solution to their customers. We are enthusiastic about working with Quintus," said Joe Yaworski, general manager, Natural Understanding Group, Unisys Corporation.

"The technology partnership will allow us to distribute Quintus' technology and provide our customers with the most complete solution to help them service their customers faster and more cost effectively," said Yaworski.

As part of this technology partnership, Quintus will also incorporate NL Assistant in future releases of Quintus CustomerQ. CustomerQ is Quintus' flagship solution for help desks and call centers serving critical line-of-business applications.

"Helping call centers meet their commitments to quality, accuracy, and timelines while controlling costs is fundamental to what we do," said Alan Anderson, president and CEO, Quintus Corporation.

"With NL Assistant, callers will have far greater latitude in expressing their requests without the long, awkward prompt-and-respond paradigms of most voice systems. Working together, Quintus and Unisys have come up with a way for businesses to offer premier customer support without increasing staff size or caller frustration. Its a combination no other vendors can provide," continued Anderson.

Help Desks and Call Centers to Benefit

NL Assistant will let computers recognize and respond to conversational input, without the need for complex structured dialogs or limited vocabularies. The system responds to either speech or text. This means that customers can place a telephone call, use the World Wide Web, send email, or use a kiosk, and they will connect with the same system and receive the same level of service.

A CustomerQ application with Unisys' NL Assistant embedded will permit spoken "conversations" between humans and computers over the telephone or text conversations across the Internet. The combined technologies will enable a broad range of applications, from banking by phone and account, credit, and loan services, to order entry or reservation systems.

Availability

Unisys' Natural Language Assistant software became available to selected partners in the second quarter 1996.

Quintus' CustomerQ software incorporating the Unisys NLA will be available mid 1997.

About the Companies

Quintus Corporation is a leading supplier of software solutions for the customer-driven enterprise, with an emphasis on "non-traditional" help desks and call centers. The company focuses on the deployment of help desks and call centers serving critical line-of-business applications. Targeted non-traditional applications include tracking, managing, and resolving customer issues coming into support centers at banks and financial service providers, consumer product companies and healthcare providers. Quintus' application solutions for call centers and help desks are used by more than 220 customers worldwide across a variety of industries.

With out-of-the-box applications, the industry's most flexible and powerful customization tool, and professional services, education and support, Quintus provides its customers with rapid implementation of customer solutions and low cost of deployment and ownership.

Privately held, Quintus is based in Fremont, Calif., with regional sales offices in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Seattle, and Dallas. For product information on CustomerQ or WebQ, Quintus' Web interface which provides universal client access to CustomerQ, contact Quintus at 800/337-8941, by FAX at 510/770-1377, by Internet at sales@quintus.com, or via the Web at http://www.quintus.com.

The Unisys Computer Systems Group (CSG) is the Unisys technology business. The people of CSG design, develop, produce and sell the advanced hardware, middleware and system software that serve as the building blocks for traditional and advanced information management solutions.

CSG works with clients, with Unisys services groups, and with outside integrators and consultants, independent software developers, distributors and resellers in providing these technology building blocks to help them better serve their customers. Few other companies have the breadth of experience of the Computer Systems Group -- from enterprise servers to parallel processing to PCs, with all the software and peripherals in between. For more information visit Unisys home page at http://www.unisys.com. -0-