Partnership targets increasing demand for mobile multimodal applications in Europe

New York, New York – September 14, 2004. Kirusa, the world’s leading provider of multimodal solutions, and SVOX, the award winning supplier of text-to-speech software, today announced a partnership to bring to market Kirusa Multimodal Solution integrated with SVOX Text-to-Speech Software.

Kirusa and SVOX have successfully integrated their platforms to create the joint multimodal solution for wireless carriers, automotive manufacturers, and enterprises. Having been successfully deployed and tested at Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (FTW), the multimodal solution is available immediately, and is being sold jointly by the two companies.

Combining today’s two most popular mobile communications technologies, the innovative multimodal solution leverages the best of visual and vocal interfaces on mobile devices. Subscribers can receive visual responses while they are interacting with a vocal application, and can choose to enter information by voice and hear the results while interacting with a screen-based application. For instance, in a telematics application, music options can be selected by voice, with the results displayed on a screen, and confirmed by voice. In a messaging application, a teenage subscriber could send an SMS message to his friend asking for the social plans for the evening, and the friend could listen and respond with a voice message. Empowered to avoid the difficulty of keypad entry and the memory strain of vocal output, users can take advantage of the powerful visual capabilities of SMS, and HTML, together with the flexibility of a voice interface.

SVOX Text-to-Speech allows users to hear dynamic information spoken by natural voices. SVOX’s language-independent text-to-speech system architecture can be very easily tailored to specific customer needs. SVOX TTS has a highly scalable and open architecture, which is low risk, quickly available and customizable to various TTS applications such as email/SMS-reading, caller name announcement, traffic announcement or navigation prompts. The modular SVOX Text-to-Speech Engine is available in different product variants that cover the complete range of text-to-speech applications – from server-based SVOX Corporate to SVOX Genie for lowest footprint systems running on mobile phones or other consumer products.

“True value for customers lies in easy-to-use applications”, said Volker Jantzen, CEO of SVOX. “The combination of Kirusa’s and SVOX’s capabilities provides the synergies needed for real progress in usability.”

Enabling wireless carriers, service providers, and enterprises to offer applications with integrated voice and visual interfaces, Kirusa’s multimodal solutions allow mobile users to simultaneously or alternatively use voice, text, graphics, keypad, and stylus to interface with wireless services and applications. The solution integrates seamlessly with industry standard technologies such as SMS, WAP, XHTML, VoiceXML, and HTTP, and supports all major mobile networks, including CDMA, CDMA 1x/3x, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Flash OFDM, WiFi, and others. Enabling compelling multimodal end-user applications on a wide variety of handsets from all major manufacturers – carriers and enterprises offering this dynamic service are able to monetize voice and data applications immediately, leveraging the new smart devices, as well as devices already widely deployed in their networks.

“We are delighted to partner with SVOX to bring to market a fully pre-integrated multimodal platform”, said Ewald Anderl, Vice President and CTO of Kirusa. “The partnership benefits our customers by providing them with a proven and fully supported platform in their preferred language, thereby enhancing the usability and adoption of applications amongst their mobile users.”

About Kirusa
Kirusa, Inc. is a multimodal solutions company that has developed industry leading multimodal technology (with several patents pending) for the delivery of applications using multimodal interfaces. This next generation of wireless technology allows users to customize the presentation of information on wireless devices by either alternating, or simultaneously receiving information through visual and voice interfaces. Kirusa develops the unique Kirusa Voice SMS multimodal application, and supports third party developers of multimodal applications. Kirusa's customers include the worlds' leading telecom carriers, such as France Telecom, Bouygues Telecom, and Mobilkom Austria. Kirusa is headquartered in Edison, New Jersey and was founded by telecom and Internet industry veterans from AT&T, Lucent and Vodafone Airtouch. For more information about Kirusa please call its headquarters at +1 (732) 623-2118 or visit www.kirusa.com.

About SVOX
SVOX AG was founded in 2000 as a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Its core product is text-to-speech software. The multiple award-winning SVOX technology is used in fields such as automotive and mobile devices, telecommunications and call centers. SVOX differentiates itself by offering customized text-to-speech. With SVOX's
software architecture customers are offered a text-to-speech engine adaptable to their technical and market needs. Alongside clients such as Swisscom and D-Link, SVOX also collaborates closely with partners such as Harman/Becker, Siemens mobile, Siemens VDO, VoiceGenie, Code Factory, Voice Robots, ONCE and ART. For more information about SVOX please call its headquarters at +41 (43) 544 0627 or visit www.svox.com.

Media Contact:
Inderpal Singh Mumick, Kirusa, Inc, +1 732 623-2118 ext. 217, mumick@kirusa.com
Bettina Hein, SVOX AG, +41 43 544 06 27, hein@svox.com

© 2001-2010 Kirusa, Inc.