BURLINGTON, MA, October 6, 2008 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN) today announced that it has completed a key phase in its ongoing effort to help enterprises evolve the way they interact with their consumers, create an improved customer experiences and realize significant cost reductions.

For the first time, through the Nuance On-Demand network, customers have access to solutions based upon four cornerstones of contact center service automation:

Leading Technology — Nuance On-Demand provides early access to Nuance’s market leading speech technologies – such as Nuance Recognizer 9.0 and Nuance SmartListener™ technology – and its feature rich outbound solution, the Nuance Notification Hub.
Proven Expertise — Nuance provides an unparalleled capability to extract the highest levels of automation and customer satisfaction from its technology assets through the experience and expertise of the Nuance R&D and Professional Services organizations
Extensive Data — Nuance’s Deployment Databank, comprising more than a petabyte of data and metadata gleaned from billions of real world examples from around the globe, accelerates product and deployment optimization to deliver solutions that are swiftly bought to bear through the Nuance On-Demand network.
Agile Delivery — Nuance On-Demand is an industry-leading, carrier-grade hosted speech platform built to rapidly deliver superior call center automation and customer experiences at scale.

“Today’s callers are amazed when they interact with the latest speech technologies from Nuance,” said Mikael Berner, vice president and general manager of Nuance On-Demand. “Nuance On-Demand now delivers the latest R&D innovations directly to the customer, ultimately the caller, as soon as our researchers have it ready. This means our solutions can better understand callers to create more engaging interactions and increase call automation – a critical metric for enterprises in today’s tough economic climate.”

“Combining the largest group of contact center self-service experts on a Google-like network with the latest technologies and access to massive amounts of customer interaction data provides a breakthrough customer experience,” said Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. “Just as Google continuously refines its approach in response to billions of Web queries, Nuance refines its approach based on data from the billions of phone-based interactions it has automated. By constantly adding new technologies and refining interactions with massive amounts of data, Nuance has built an extremely valuable solution for the market.”

Breakthrough Technologies

The latest, cutting-edge solutions incorporated into the Nuance On-Demand network include:

Nuance Recognizer v9 delivers unprecedented recognition accuracy, enabling a more natural, flexible user interface that gives users increasingly unique and personalized experiences in an automated environment. Recognizer v9 has a 27% error reduction rate across multiple tasks and languages over its predecessors, and a 45% improvement in detecting speech in noisy environments, a critical function to help ensure speech applications perform well for mobile callers.
SmartListener is a key component of Recognizer v9, improves application automation and the overall caller experience by proficiently handling unexpected words or phrases used by callers. These out-of-grammar inputs are the primary cause of callers failing to stay in an automated customer service solution they have started using. Smart Listener accurately interprets the meaning of these inputs – driving the ease of use, quality and accuracy of automated speech solutions.
RealSpeak® 4.5 is a text-to-speech engine that takes text as input from a variety of sources and converts it into remarkably natural sounding speech output. Ideal for presenting dynamic content such as news, weather, account data and stock prices, Realspeak’s powerful features and enhancements deliver high-quality, accuracy, system density and tunability.
Nuance Notification Hub presents an outbound solution that enables automated, actionable SMS, email or voice notifications at specific points in the customer lifecycle. This solution is intelligent, in that it can recognize whether it is receiving a busy signal, voicemail, live person or fax, and take the appropriate action. These notifications not only reduce inbound call volumes. They also increase customer satisfaction and create new revenue opportunities by proactively contacting consumers with personalized, timely and relevant communications.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses 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 www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance, RealSpeak, SmartListener and the Nuance logo are trademarks, registered trademarks or brands of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and other countries. All other companies or product names are the property of the respective owners.