VOCALIS ANNOUNCES FURTHER SUCCESS FOR SPEECHTEL IN MALAYSIA

Vocalis Group plc, the Cambridge UK based speech recognition telephony company announces today a further order for SPEECHtel™, its intelligent network peripheral platform and products. Combined with Ericssons Network Intelligence™, SPEECHtel already provides an automated public directory enquiries and assistance service for Telekom Malaysia that has been operational since 1996.

The phenomenal success of the Malaysia service means that the original capacity provided has already been exceeded. Further capacity has been ordered from Ericsson by Telekom Malaysia, with a contract value to Vocalis of GBP 450,000. Vocalis will also install the latest version of Vocalis SpeechWare™, its world leading speech recognition technology which enables natural interactions between the customer and the service using the spoken user interface, Vocalis SUI™.

Vocalis has OEM agreements in place with the two major network divisions of Ericsson - Infocom Systems for fixed wire and Radio Systems for mobile networks - under which Vocalis continues to provide Ericsson worldwide, including all of its divisions and affiliates, with speech recognition solutions. Through these agreements, proven products and applications are delivered now to world leading public telephone network operators.

"This order for Telekom Malaysia, a major network operator, is another endorsement of Vocalis’ strategy to exploit intelligent network opportunities in partnership with Ericsson." said Charles Halle, CEO of Vocalis. He added "The initial installation with Telekom Malaysia is an unqualified success and this additional order confirms their high level of satisfaction with our speech driven network based services."

Using SPEECHtel platforms running Vocalis SpeechWare recognition technology, Vocalis provides world leading Interactive Voice Response capability within intelligent network solutions. This emphasis on placing speech recognition capability in the network provides telephone network operators with the ability to maintain customer loyalty and reduce churn, independent of the telephone handsets chosen by the customers. It also provides the opportunity to integrate a range of applications and provide tailored customer packages.

Jonathan Hart, Sales Director at Vocalis commented, "After an intense period of experimentation and market analysis, we are confident that the foreseeable future for truly intelligent voice based telephony services lies firmly within networks. Today’s demand for sophisticated applications using speech recognition means that server based computing power is essential. Server based systems allow our telephony applications to perform speech recognition that offers exceptional levels of accuracy while maintaining natural conversational dialogues."

Reduced processing capability within cellular telephones and other handheld devices can be used successfully for limited tasks - such as recognising words like "yes, no, repeat" or a handful of personal number entries when spoken by one regular user. However, the massive amount of computing power that can be devoted to speech recognition in a network server based solution enables truly natural transactions to take place in applications available to the public such as directory assistance, collect call and person to person calling. Coupled with the ability to rapidly develop and make changes to established operational services, Vocalis is confident that server based power clearly points to the future of truly intelligent speech driven services being implemented within the heart of intelligent networks, using solutions such as SPEECHtel.

Network Intelligence is a trademark of Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson

SPEECHtel, Vocalis SpeechWare and SUI are trademarks of Vocalis Ltd

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