InTouch and Nuance team to deliver Voice Portal Software to Service Providers

Business Wire, April 20, 1999

Joint Marketing Agreement to Promote InTouch's Voice Portal Software

and Nuance's Leading Speech Recognition Technology

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 20, 1999--

InTouch Systems, the leading supplier of voice portal software, today announced it has entered into a joint marketing agreement with Nuance Communications, the leading provider of speech recognition and speaker verification software for V-Commerce and telecommunications transactions.

InTouch Systems and Nuance will jointly promote and market the companies' products and technologies to the wireless, wireline, and Internet service provider market. The two companies have cooperated in the development of state-of-the-art, speech technology solutions and this agreement formalizes and solidifies the business relationship between them.

InFlection, Leading Edge Voice Portal Software

The combination of InTouch and Nuance products will enable service providers to rapidly deploy speech recognition-based services as part of their customer retention programs. InTouch's InFlection software provides users with natural language, voice control of Internet and telephony services from any telephone. InFlection helps service providers to attract new users, reduce churn rate, and offer fully branded, differentiating enhanced services.

"InTouch works with technology leaders to provide its customers with superior voice solutions. The leading edge performance and scalability of Nuance's speech recognition and speaker verification technology, makes it a natural choice for use in the InFlection application suite," said Graeme W. Smith, director of product marketing for InTouch Systems.

"Service providers are aware of the need to differentiate services, leverage infrastructure investments, reduce churn, and adopt advanced technologies to reach new markets. The partnership between InTouch and Nuance will help service providers to address these issues through the deployment of advanced speech recognition-based voice user interfaces (VUI)," said William Meisel, president of TMA Associates, Tarzana, CA, a leading speech technology consultant. "The flexibility and naturalness of speech recognition relative to the limitations of the touch-tone pad constitute a major change in the telephony user interface, much as the graphical user interface (GUI) changed the PC market. Telephone speech recognition opens significant new opportunities for service providers."

Nuance Delivers Highly Accurate and Scaleable V-Commerce

Technology

V-Commerce, or voice-enabled e-commerce, applications bring the power of speech recognition to electronic commerce, front-office and back-office applications. V-Commerce applications enable companies to have their customers contact them through their choice of interfaces including the Web and the telephone. InTouch plans to join the V-Commerce Alliance, a group of technology and services companies that are collaborating with Nuance to make it easier to build and deploy V-Commerce applications.

"We are excited that InTouch has chosen to support Nuance products for its InFlection voice portal software," said Kathy Frostad, director of telecommunications marketing for Nuance Communications. "The combination of InTouch's proven voice portal software with Nuance's leading speech recognition and speaker verification products offers an ideal solution for service providers wishing to quickly leverage the business benefits of natural language speech recognition access to enhanced services."

About V-Commerce

V-Commerce applications enable anybody who is away from a computer to reap the benefits of electronic commerce through natural language speech recognition. Using speech recognition, a company can offer self-service transactions over both the Web and telephone through a common core set of databases and e-commerce servers. For more information, see the V-Commerce Web site at http://www.v-commerce.com or try out V-Commerce applications at 1-877-TRY-VCOM.

About InTouch Systems

InTouch develops and sells InFlection, a suite of intelligent voice-controlled software applications that provides a voice portal software platform to Internet, enhanced telephony, and E-commerce services. Privately held, and headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., InTouch focuses exclusively on voice-enabling new and enhanced services in the service provider market. In partnership with leading telecommunication system vendors, we help service providers attract, retain, and grow their customers. For more information, see InTouch's Web site at http://www.intouchsys.com or call 617/497-9800.

About Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications provides enterprise-level speech recognition and speaker verification software to automate V-Commerce and communications transactions. Users interact with deployed Nuance systems over one million times per day using everyday conversational language. Nuance's products support a variety of languages including U.S. English, U.K. English, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, German, Japanese and Latin American Spanish. Nuance was named one of Upside's Hot 100 Private Companies and Red Herring's Top 50 Privately Held Companies. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. and maintains offices in Germany and the United Kingdom. For more information, see Nuance's Web site at http://www.nuance.com or call 650/847-0000