Edify Announces General Availability Of Voice And Speech Enhanced Multi-Channel Platform At SpeechTEK 2003

Edify Corporation, an S1 company and a leading provider of voice and speech solutions, announced today that it will be rolling out the voice and speech enhanced version of its proven multi-channel platform, Edify 8.5 at SpeechTEK 2003. Strategically developed to meet the evolving requirements of voice and speech self-service, Edify 8.5 underscores Edify's focus on providing customers around the globe with the ability to design, build and deploy the very latest voice and speech solutions.

"Edify's 8.5 release provides users with the most extensive set of speech and text-to-speech resources available as well as very broad standards support," said Mark Plakias, senior analyst at The Zelos Group. "By participating in our Speech Solution Challenge at the SpeechTEK 2003 conference, leading speech vendors such as Edify will be able to showcase the strength of their platform. I think attendees are really looking forward to seeing leading platforms like Edify shine in a live test case scenario."

With the release of Edify 8.5, customers in financial services, travel, transportation, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and other key global markets will gain a significant number of new features and extended functionality that will improve their ability to deploy successful automation solutions. For instance, Verizon (NYSE: VZ), an early adopter of Edify 8.5, now has the potential to support a wide range of standards and specifications therefore, eliminating concern over application functionality and compatibility issues.

"Verizon is continually looking for ways to more effectively automate and improve speech-based operations for its enterprise business customers," said Mark Kayserman, executive director development at Verizon. "Working with Edify and its partners such as BBN we see the potential to leverage its voice and speech applications to greatly enhance our interaction systems."

Edify 8.5 now provides full integration support for ScanSoft's SpeechPearl XML 1.0 and BBN's HARK speech recognition engine. BBN HARK is a full-featured, large vocabulary speech engine and provides Edify customers with another established alternative for their speech solutions.

"As the first platform in North America to support ScanSoft's SpeechPearl XML, we are delivering seamless access to a proven, standards based speech engine that is built to leverage standards like Voice XML and SALT," said Ted Bray, director of product marketing at Edify. "In addition to its extensive standards support, SpeechPearl XML also supports 46 languages, providing Edify customers with a truly global solution to their speech recognition needs. We are making it easy and less expensive to enhance functionality and extend standards support for speech solutions."

Edify 8.5 New Features:
Edify 8.5 provides customers with new robust voice and speech functionality as well as greater flexibility and control in the contact center. In addition to the support of the two new speech engines noted above, Edify 8.5 offers the following:

• Supports large, geographically distributed call centers - Advanced Enterprise Telephony support for Cisco's Intelligent Call Manager, providing leading voice and speech integration for distributed call centers.
• Eliminates the need for proprietary markup to "standards-based applications" - A fully compliant Voice XML 2.0 browser with complete integration to the latest speech engines from Nuance and ScanSoft and TTS integration through industry standard SAPI 5.1. Edify's Voice Browser allows customers to deploy Voice XML applications that are true to the Voice XML standard, eliminating the need for proprietary markups.
• Leverages broad support for open standards to integrate leading technologies - Through the open standard SOAP, Edify 8.5 integrates with ScanSoft's SpeechSecure 2.0, a leading speaker verification technology providing biometric security for voice and speech applications.
• Provides leading global telephony support - Supports global telephony protocols like CAS EL8 and DPNSS, as well as new ISDN features that help significantly drive down call center costs while increasing customer satisfaction through improved knowledge of the caller.
• Ensures that customers will get the most from the ever-changing world of speech technology - Edify 8.5 provides leading integration to the latest speech and text-to-speech technologies from ScanSoft, Nuance and BBN.

Edify 8.5 features the following enhancements to Edify's Contact Center Offering:

• Improved interface for Edify Email combines real time operation monitoring, queue management and rapid access to the details of in-process emails. This enables CSR management to monitor and track operation targets, such as agent productivity and target queue times providing valuable insight into contact center performance efficiency.
• Enhanced email auto-response - Edify's patented Deep Linguistic Processing (DLP) is the only system to provide powerful topic identification and sophisticated data extraction enabling effective email auto-response. DLP can be used to develop a sophisticated personalized response saving agents significant time in looking up information and in composing replies. Edify provides the back office integration and DLP for effective, time saving, automated message processing.
• Improved software functionality provides Edify Contact Center with greater efficiency and load handling capability.

Availability
Edify 8.5 allows organizations to improve their customer service and support offerings and increase operational effectiveness, while reducing the overall cost of system ownership. Edify 8.5 is available now. The BBN HARK and ScanSoft SpeechPearl XML 1.0 speech recognition integrations ship late October. Edify will be exhibiting (booth #711) at SpeechTEK 2003, being held September 29 through October 2 at the New York Marriott Marquis. (www.speechtek.com).

About Edify Corporation
Edify is a leading global provider to more than 2000 customers worldwide. Edify offers voice, speech recognition and contact center applications combined with expert consultation to improve customer service and reduce costs through automation and increased operational effectiveness, providing a complete customer service offering.

Organizations worldwide utilize Edify's standards-based platform to manage complex data to deliver a consistent and satisfying customer experience across all channels while providing a high return on investment.