Nuance and Bury Jointly Develop Speech-Enabled Telematics Solutions; Cooperation between Nuance and Bury delivers its first project for speech-enabled hands-free car kits

Business Wire, March 14, 2006

LOHNE, Germany & GHENT, Belgium -- Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN) and Bury GmbH & Co KG today announced a partnership to jointly develop market-leading speech-enabled telematics solutions for the automotive market allowing hands-free voice dialing and SMS reading. The partnership has already secured its first contract with one of Europe's leading luxury car manufacturers. The first version of the product supports US and UK English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, with other languages to follow.

"The speech-enabled telematics unit improves ease-of-use and safety of the driver when using the telephone in the car," said Peter Hauser, general manager and senior vice president, Nuance International. "Given the strict legislation in most countries, hands-free car kits are indispensable for using the phone in the car. We are very pleased with this joint project with Bury and we are now looking to offer the solution more widely to the automotive sector."

When using the hands-free voice dialing solution the driver can simply speak any entry in their phone address book. The system then reads back the chosen name for confirmation in a natural-sounding, pleasant and intelligible text-to-speech voice. The driver can also control and edit the address book by voice, in a hands-free and eyes-free manner. As the solution is speaker-independent, the system is able to immediately recognize and pronounce the vast number of entries in a typical address book without being "trained" by a user. Since drivers cannot always look at a screen safely to verify a name or number, accurate text-to-speech voice feedback is critical to close the loop for any dialing instructions, ensuring the hands-free car kit system's effectiveness.

The system also informs the driver about incoming SMS messages, with the ability to read the messages to the driver. The so-called text normalisation algorithm is able to convert SMS specific mnemonics into natural output. For example, "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening xoxo" will be read "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening. Many kisses."

"The cooperation with Nuance has been very fruitful and we anticipate a lot of momentum for future projects and solutions," says Reinhard Meyer, commercial director, Bury.

Two Nuance(R) solutions were included in this joint project: VoCon(R) 3200 and RealSpeak(TM) Solo 4.0.

VoCon 3200 is the renowned embedded speech recognition engine from Nuance. This solution is speaker-independent, has continuous speech recognition and is especially tuned to meet the demanding accuracy requirements in noisy environments. VoCon 3200 can recognise very large vocabularies of 100,000 names. The speaker adaptation functionality increases the individual recognition performance, by adapting the system to the car driver's voice. It supports 18 languages, covering all key European, Asian and North American languages.

RealSpeak(TM) Solo 4.0 is a text-to-speech solution, optimised to enhance embedded conversational applications. The solution provides outstanding natural-sounding voice quality output, which has been demonstrated in a number of industry benchmarks. RealSpeak comes with built-in support for abbreviations and foreign words. RealSpeak Solo supports 22 languages, many of these with different voices.

About Nuance Automotive Solutions

Nuance offers the most complete, integrated suite of technologies and services to speech-enable functions in the car, including voice-activated dialing, voice destination entry for navigation systems, vehicle command and control, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. Speech offers a natural, safe, and convenient interface for drivers. Nuance speech recognition and text-to-speech software deliver state-of-the-art performance and a rich set of features and tools tailored for the highly demanding automotive environment. The company has strong partnerships with the most widely recognized names in the automotive industry including top auto manufacturers, such as BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Nissan and Renault.

About Nuance Communications Inc.

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for business and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications, and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share, and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications. For more information, please visit nuance.com.

About Bury:

Bury GmbH & Co. KG belongs to the leading manufacturers of hands-free car kits and navigation systems in Europe. On the basis of independently developed technologies the company produces and markets - under the brand name Bury - innovative products in 42 countries for the increasing market of mobile communication and navigation. Cooperations with all important manufacturers of mobile phones as well as Tele Atlas as the leading provider of digitalized navigation data ensure the quickest possible availability of current products. Besides the sales via qualified specialized trade and automotive service companies, OEM products by Bury are also sold by a variety of renowned automotive manufacturers such as Bentley, Mazda, Toyota, Opel, VW as well as mobile network operators such as Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange. www.thb.de