Nuance Unveils OmniPage Professional 16, Making Paper and PDF Conversion More Valuable to More People Than Ever Before

Business Wire, July 31, 2007

World's Best Selling OCR and Document Conversion Software Delivers Unrivaled Accuracy, Ease-of-Use and Innovative Features - Using Your Scanner, MFP and Digital Camera

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today introduced OmniPage[R] Professional 16, the newest version of the world's best-selling and most accurate optical character recognition (OCR) and document conversion application for Microsoft Windows. With the best document conversion accuracy, breakthrough three-dimensional (3D) digital camera capture technology and amazing speed advances, OmniPage Professional 16 is the easiest way to edit, share and store paper, PDF and electronic documents.

Its high accuracy and patented innovations have made OmniPage Professional the world's best-selling desktop OCR application for years. The new release of OmniPage Professional strengthens the heart of OCR by delivering a 27 percent increase in document conversion accuracy and speed increases of up to 46 percent. Better still, Nuance has integrated its newest technology to take advantage of today's pervasive dual-core processors to deliver an amazing 97 percent speed improvement when comparing OmniPage 15 on a single core system - making OmniPage 16 up to 50 percent more accurate and more than 46 percent faster than alternatives.

OmniPage Professional 16 is also the first desktop OCR application to provide native support for the new open standard Ecma Open XML file formats used by the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Further, OmniPage Professional 16 is the first OCR application to provide input and export support for the XML Paper Specification, or XPS, an important new 'electronic paper' format for scanning, sharing, archiving and indexing documents for search applications.

"I think we've all recognized that paper documents are not going away anytime soon, and they continue to create significant business and productivity challenges when compared to electronic documents," said Ralph Gammon, editor and publisher, Document Imaging Report. "With OmniPage 16, Nuance shows that OCR and document conversion can be applied in new ways to overcome these challenges. Increased speed and accuracy, a simplified user interface, enhanced forms capabilities, XPS and Office 2007 support - all of these features cement Nuance's status as a leader in the document capture market. OmniPage continues to offer real value and time savings benefits to organizations of all sizes."

Because of its accuracy and ease of use, millions have selected OmniPage over alternatives to replace manual document conversion with an automated approach, saving time and overcoming the high costs associated with traditional paper processes. Organizations large and small turn to OmniPage to automate the paper-to-digital conversion and archiving of every kind of document - including letters, contracts, spreadsheets, magazine articles, research reports, technical manuals and more.

"The new release of OmniPage delivers powerful document capture and conversion capabilities that are particularly valuable to users of Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007," said Gray Knowlton, group product manager for the Office Group at Microsoft Corp. "Supporting the Ecma Open XML file formats and XPS will help users capture and exchange information in open formats - an important step forward in enabling interoperability."

Most compelling in OmniPage 16 are the features and capabilities that extend the applications of OCR and document conversion to a broader set of everyday document tasks. Many of the enhancements and new features in OmniPage 16 are unique innovations not available in alternative solutions. These include:

* Best OCR and Document Conversion Accuracy - OmniPage Professional 16 is 27 percent more accurate in overall document conversion than the previous release, with significant advances in providing "same as original" conversion to editable formats. Instead of relying on text boxes and other visual tricks to mimic the look of the original, OmniPage duplicates the original using the highest-level features within word processing and spreadsheet applications. This results in columns, tables, graphics and text that are eminently editable, and makes OmniPage 16 up to 50 percent more accurate than alternatives.

* The Fastest Ever - OmniPage Professional 16 avoids the traditional trade-off of accuracy at the expense of speed. The new release is both more accurate and faster, delivering up to 46 percent speed improvements for document conversion. Nuance has implemented additional improvements that enable even better performance on Intel and AMD dual-core processing chips, which have become common for personal computers from vendors such as Dell and HP.

* Innovative 3D Capture for Digital Cameras - A picture really can be worth a thousand words with OmniPage Professional 16. While others have tried to support converting documents captured using digital cameras, the accuracy and results have disappointed. Through the addition of 3DC, or 3D Capture, OmniPage automatically corrects for the distortion of the angle and rotation of the camera, as well as for the curve of the page in an open book - making OmniPage 16 a practical solution for digital camera capture and up to an astounding 74 percent more accurate than alternatives.