Discern Awarded 2002 ``Product of the Year'' by Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine

Business Wire, Jan 27, 2003

Business Editors & Technology Writers

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 27, 2003

Discern Answers Free-form Questions, from Multiple

Media, with Unprecedented Precision

Discern Communications, a spinout of SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), announced today that Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC)'s Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine named Discern as a Product of the Year winner for 2002. According to the magazine editors, Customer Inter@actions Solutions magazine bestows Product of the Year awards to companies that have demonstrated excellence in technological advancement and application refinements.

"We recognized Discern as providing high value for customer service and support organizations in reducing the effort required to provide precise answers to questions," said Rich Tehrani, TMC President and Group Editor-in-Chief. "The Discern suite goes the extra mile to improve the customer experience and deliver a compelling ROI for companies that use the products."

"This award further validates what we've been hearing from our customers - that a manageable solution for automating web, email and phone inquiries has meaningful benefits in terms of customer satisfaction and cost savings," said Greg Whittemore, Discern's Chief Technology Officer. "Discern's core technology is easier to use and five times more precise than search engines for answering customer Web inquiries. And Discern has added utility because it enables the same core engine to be easily extended to e-mail, chat and CRM applications."

Discern features a simple user interface that lets customers pose questions in their own words, key words or sentences. In response, Discern delivers the precise answer on the first page, not thousands of links. The same Discern engine supports web, email and phone inquiries, so customer service and support organizations and can increases accuracy and reduce response times for customer inquiries across the organization, while minimizing the administrative overhead required to support the solution. Furthermore, Discern is fast and easy to install and support, because the process of implementing and adding source materials is highly automated.

Discern uses language understanding technology to understand the customer's question and the content of an enterprise's diverse information sources, including structured data sources and unstructured sources (documents, pdfs, html). As such, customers experience five times more precision finding answers than with search engines. Discern's automated query/response technology is based on more than 10 years of work by SRI and a $25 million technology investment by the U.S. government.

Discern is browser-based, and runs on Solaris, Linux and NT, and features open APIs through Enterprise Java Beans in a J2EE framework.

The award will be featured in the January issue of Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine and at http://www.tmcnet.com/cis/0103/0103cccrms.htm.> About Discern Communications

Discern Communications, a spinout of SRI International, provides products that automate the deployment and operation of question answering for customer service and support centers. Regardless of whether a customer's query comes from a Web page, an email or the phone, Discern provides highly precise answers, dramatically improves customer satisfaction, reduces human resource reliance, and offers a low life-cycle management cost. Discern's products are currently used by multinational corporations, U.S. intelligence agencies, and the U.S. military. News and information can be found at www.discern.com. Discern sells its products directly, as well as through Value Added Resellers, like Spanlink Communications (www.spanlink.com).