Orlando, FL - January 31, 2006 -- Voxeo Corporation, a recognized leader in the market for voice application platforms, today announced Voxeo Prophecy, a powerful new platform designed to make it dramatically easier and more affordable for enterprises to create and deploy speech applications. Unique in the industry, Voxeo Prophecy eliminates traditional barriers to enterprise speech deployment by bundling a full-featured telephony platform with world-class speech recognition and synthesis at less than one-fifth the cost of previous offerings.

"Ten years ago, the web was not widespread. Today, it's pervasive. In comparison, speech technology has had relatively stagnant growth," said Jonathan Taylor, president and CEO of Voxeo. "The web succeeded in large part because it was extremely inexpensive to build and deploy applications and the software needed to build these applications was extremely accessible. In contrast, speech technologies have remained expensive, complex, and inaccessible to most enterprises. Prophecy eliminates those problems, allowing voice applications to be deployed as quickly and easily as web applications. In fact, just like most web server software, Voxeo Prophecy can be downloaded for free and running calls on a PC in less than 15 minutes."

Prophecy is a premium speech platform, a versatile voice-over-IP (VoIP) platform, and a battle-tested interactive voice response (IVR) platform, all rolled into a single software download. With an abundance of telephony features, Prophecy also delivers greater functionality than any other product in the industry. More importantly, Prophecy breaks through traditional industry barriers by providing high-quality speech recognition and speech synthesis capabilities at no additional cost, making it the first telephony platform that enables developers to easily and cost-effectively add speech functionality to telephony applications.

Prior to Prophecy, developers had to purchase licenses costing more than $2,500 per port to add high-quality speech technologies to applications. In 2000, Voxeo began to change this model by creating Evolution, a free online portal that was able to give developers access to these costly third-party speech recognition and synthesis technologies by amortizing the licensing costs across the board. For the first time in the industry, developers could experiment, prototype, and test new architectures and ideas in speech and telephony without being forced to pay the large up-front licensing investments.

However, developers also needed to develop these applications on their own in-house platforms. To make this cost-effective, Voxeo undertook a four-year stealth development project to build its own Prophecy Speech Recognizer and Speech Synthesizer components. The resulting application development platform, Voxeo Prophecy, is simple enough to run on a laptop, yet scalable enough to run thousands of ports in a carrier-class network. In addition, Prophecy avoids the vendor lock-in forced by other proprietary platforms by employing the industry's first and only Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) browser interface that can pass one hundred percent of the standard's mandatory and optional compliance tests.

Prophecy also leverages the Call Control Extensible Markup Language (CCXML) standard to provide the call management, routing and conferencing capabilities that VoiceXML alone lacks. Acknowledged as the world's most proven CCXML implementation, Voxeo's CCMXL browser has been in commercial deployment since 2002.

Other Prophecy features include call conferencing, call recording, comprehensive SIP-based VoIP telephony support, a built-in soft-phone, the SQLite database engine, and a web server supporting PHP 5.1 and Java/JSP, all in a single 80 megabyte download with zero configuration requirements.

A highly respected pioneer within the voice industry, Voxeo was among the first to utilize the power of web markup languages and servers to empower telephony application development. These technologies enable conventional web developers and business enterprises to easily and cost-effectively build speech and telephony solutions. In fact, Voxeo Prophecy works much like a web browser, presenting a comfortable, standards-based application development environment that works with and leverages traditional web-centric technologies. For example, VoiceXML allows any web application to tell the Voxeo Prophecy Voice Platform when and how to prompt, listen, and respond to a caller, while CCXML enables a web-based application to place outbound calls, perform conference calls, or intelligently transfer and route calls.

As a result, Prophecy is the world's first voice software application platform to feature retail-like simplicity at an extremely low price. The power of the Prophecy platform will be integrated across Voxeo's entire IVR and VoIP product lines, which have empowered over 14,000 companies to create and deploy more than 30,000 applications. Voxeo's platform software has also routed over one billion calls and played, recorded and conferenced over three trillion VoIP packets since its inception in 1999.

In addition to its industry-leading technology, Voxeo is renowned for its innovative corporate structure and abnormally high level of customer service. For example, a large portion of each employee's salary is based on a profit-sharing plan that incorporates customer-service metrics, encouraging employees to solve problems proactively while paying attention to the customer experience. As a result, Voxeo is the only telephony provider to offer a 100 percent uptime service level agreement.

Prophecy is available as premise software sold by the port, as a hosted service charged per minute, or as a hybrid where applications are hosted both on premise and on Voxeo's hosted network simultaneously. Immediately available at www.voxeo.com/prophecy, the 2-port version of Prophecy is free. An upgrade to a four-port version costs just $249, and additional ports cost $549. Prophecy runs on Windows 2000, 2003, and XP, and will be available for Linux and Mac OS systems later this year.

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