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SpliceCom & Cepstral Announce Text-To-Speech Partnership for Business Telephony

13 July 2005 - Chorleywood, UK & Pittsburgh, USA; SpliceCom, a UK company specialising in communication systems which combine voice, video and web enabled IT applications at the desktop has today announced a partnership agreement with Cepstral LLC, a speech technology company based in the USA.

Under the terms of the agreement SpliceCom will embed Cepstral's Swift Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine and voices within their VoiceXML based Enhanced Speech Processing (ESP), an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application for SpliceCom's award winning maximiser business telephone system. SpliceCom's primary ESP offering will be based around Cepstral's David telephony voice.

"The addition of Cepstral's speech technology to our ESP platform allows maximiser customers to utilise high quality Text-To-Speech for everyday business tasks that require dynamic content. Our first implementations have ranged from the setting and generation of hotel wake-up calls to the announcement of phone numbering changes for a converged telephone system spanning 12 sites. The voices sound great and provide our customers with the flexibility to easily deliver a wide range of information over the phone, or across the network," said Sean Harding, CEO and MD of SpliceCom.

"Led by an experienced and proven management team, it's unsurprising that SpliceCom's maximiser business telephone system has already built a 14% share of the IP PBX marketplace in the UK" stated Kevin Lenzo, CEO and co-founder of Cepstral, LLC. "We are extremely pleased to be working with a company that is successfully delivering a well productised and scalable IP telephony system via the channel. Our new high-quality server voices are a perfect fit for SpliceCom's offering, delivering extraordinary vocal quality at an extremely competitive price. This will allow the widespread benefits of Text-To-Speech to be experienced by a far wider range of businesses."

SpliceCom's VoiceXML based ESP service for the maximiser business telephone system, featuring the Cepstral Swift TTS voices, can be enabled on a channel-by-channel basis and is available immediately.

Notes for Editors:
About SpliceCom:
SpliceCom is a privately-funded company, whose management team were behind the two most successful UK voice and data convergence companies of the 1990's - SDX Business Systems and Network Alchemy. The converged voice platforms of both companies - INDeX and Argent (since re-branded as IP Office) were acquired by Lucent Technology and are now subsequently owned by Avaya. SpliceCom's maximiser product family combines voice, video and web enabled IT applications within a single system, providing tangible business benefits for all types of companies, irrespective of their size. These products are only available via selected dealers, value added resellers and systems integrators - they are not sold directly, nor are they available via distribution. Having commenced shipments in early 2003, maximiser was voted the "Most Innovative Product" at one of the UK's premier communications trade events, Comms Channel Expo 2004, whilst SpliceCom's PCS 50 IP Softphone/Phone Partner application for Mac OS X picked up a similar award in April of this year.

About Cepstral LLC:
Cepstral is a speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, which provides speech technologies and services for the spoken delivery of information. Cepstral builds high quality, natural sounding voices for server, desktop, and hand-held applications. Cepstral also provides professional services to customize and tune voices. Cepstral: We Build Voices(tm).

Text supplied as Word Document attached.