Unveil Technologies Introduces the Unveil Conversation Manager, an Intelligent Customer Self-Service and Agent-Assist Application for Contact Centers

Unveil Technologies, Inc. today introduced the Unveil Conversation Manager, its highly anticipated customer self service and agent assist application for enterprise and carrier contact centers. The Unveil Conversation Manager Goes Beyond Current IVR and Speech Recognition Applications to Engage Customers in Flexible, Natural Conversations Via Voice and Text Channels

Unveil Technologies Introduces the Unveil Conversation Manager, an Intelligent Customer Self-Service and Agent-Assist Application for Contact Centers

Unveil Conversation Manager Goes Beyond Current IVR and Speech Recognition Applications to Engage Customers in Flexible, Natural Conversations Via Voice and Text Channels

LAS VEGAS, NV -- FEBRUARY 11, 2002 -- Unveil Technologies, Inc. today introduced the Unveil Conversation Manager, its highly anticipated customer self service and agent assist application for enterprise and carrier contact centers. The Unveil Conversation Manager is a next generation solution for automating expensive and time-consuming customer service interactions that occur over both voice (telephone) and text (e-mail, Web and chat) channels. The product enables customers to ask for information however they want, a significant improvement over todays Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and speech systems that force users into predefined scripts and restrictive call flows. Unveils solution uses the companys proprietary voice and text processing software to understand how people really talk and type, improving customer satisfaction and call automation rates. Unveil, a pioneer in the emerging market for intelligent conversational systems, introduced and demonstrated its Conversation Manager at booth #1739 at the Call Center & CRM Solutions Conference in Las Vegas.

Although Unveil has been operating in stealth mode since its inception in September 2000, its innovative approach to improving customer service and reducing contact center operating costs has been attracting the attention of industry experts and analysts. The Red Herring magazine has called Unveil one of the Northeast regions most forward thinking business and technology leaders. In December 2001, an audience of IT executives and venture capitalists at Giga Information Groups exclusive Emerging Technology conference voted Unveil the Overall Winner, Most Innovative Product and Best Business Potential in its category after seeing a demonstration of its software. Recently, the Company was invited to speak at the Harvard Business School along with speech industry leaders IBM, Motorola and SpeechWorks. Company President Peter Durlach will also be joining a panel discussion focusing on speech recognition technology in contact centers during the Call Center & CRM Solutions show.

To date, self-service applications, most notably IVR solutions, have been designed using traditional hierarchical menu tree structures, requiring customers to navigate through confusing and frustrating layers of menu choices. Todays speech recognition technology has improved this process, but still confines callers to specific pre-defined interactions depending upon where they are in a call flow," said Ivan Mimica, CEO of Unveil Technologies. Unveils Conversation Manager is a self-service application designed around the user -- it does not limit what the customer can say. The result is a more intuitive and natural experience and therefore higher automation rates and improved customer satisfaction."

The Unveil Conversation Manager
The Unveil Conversation Manager addresses the needs of customer contact centers struggling to provide high service levels while simultaneously reducing operating costs. According to recent studies, contact center administrators overwhelmingly expect transaction volumes to increase significantly in the coming years. Cost estimates for telephone-based interactions range from $4 and $10 per call. The arrival of new text channels for customer contact, such as e-mail, chat and the Web, have introduced new costs and challenges.

Unveils Conversation Manager attacks these problems by engaging customers in intelligent, flexible conversations to automatically connect them with the information they seek or perform specific transactions. Unveils solution offers distinct advantages over todays self-service applications, each of which will be demonstrated on the show floor at Call Center and CRM Solutions Las Vegas:

1. The Unveil Conversation Manager employs a proprietary Meaning Recognition Engine (MRE) that understands the way people really talk and type. This enables users to ask for information in whatever way is most comfortable and natural to them. Unveils MRE technology is ideally suited for voice recognition IVR applications because it can accurately recognize meaning in real-world conversational interactions, despite the common errors generated by even the most advanced speech recognition software. The combination of these two technologies results in a system that can more accurately recognize what customers say by understanding what they mean.

2. The Unveil Conversation Manager seamlessly blends customer self-service automation with an agent assist workflow that improves agent productivity. Todays self-service systems force customers down one of two distinct paths -- automation or live assistance. Unveils Conversation Manager introduces a new workflow that solicits live agent assistance when necessary, without requiring direct agent intervention for every escalated conversation. This workflow accelerates each interaction and ensures that customers are never stuck in a self-service loop.

3. An example-based system, the Unveil Conversation Manager empowers contact center administrators to rapidly develop, deploy and maintain conversational systems without requiring advanced linguistic expertise. Unlike current IVR and speech recognition applications that require considerable expertise and time to build, contact center administrators can rapidly develop a customized solution from previous customer conversations. This significantly reduces the cost of developing and maintaining a self-service system and provides the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing patterns in customer interactions.

Unveils Conversation Manager is currently being piloted at multiple contact center sites, including a leading multinational financial services firm. The product is expected to be available for specific vertical markets in the first half of 2002.

Unveil Technologies -- Broaden the Conversation
Unveil Technologies provides Global 2000 organizations struggling to provide high customer service levels while simultaneously reducing contact center operating costs with advanced self-service solutions that intelligently and cost-effectively automate and accelerate customer interactions over both voice and text interaction channels. Unveils solutions employ a proprietary Meaning Recognition Engine (MRE) that understands the way people really talk and type. The privately held Waltham, MA-based company was founded in September 2000 by a group of proven entrepreneurs and academics with a history of success in bringing to market enterprise systems based on speech recognition and natural language software. For more information on Unveil and its products, please visit www.unveil.com.

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Unveil Contact:
Jim Williams
Director of Marketing Communications
(781) 890-7333 ext. 16
jwilliams@unveil.com