New Contract Win

RNS Number:7125U
Eckoh Technologies PLC
28 January 2004


                                                               28 January 2004

     Eckoh Technologies appointed as interactive telephony partner for ITV

Eckoh Technologies plc ("Eckoh"), one of Europe's largest speech application
service providers, today announced it has been appointed by the UK's biggest
commercial television network ITV (formerly Granada and Carlton), to provide
interactive telephony services to the channel.

The contract, which commences on March 1st 2004, was won after a competitive
pitch process, and is anticipated to generate considerable revenues for both
organisations as the interactive telephony formats for broadcast programmes
continue to grow and develop. The agreement covers existing shows which use
telephony such as This Morning, CITV, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway,
Trisha and The Vault, as well as new formats that are yet to be broadcast.

Today's announcement will allow ITV to gain access to Eckoh's sophisticated call
processing platform which with over 7,000 ports is the largest of its kind in
the UK.  The platform supports the traditional telephony broadcast services such
as votes, competitions, polls and audience data capture, but also provides new
technologies such as speech recognition which gives ITV the opportunity to
enhance new programming concepts still in development.

Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer for Eckoh Technologies, says:

"This deal further consolidates our position as one of the largest providers of
managed interactive telephone services in the UK and having worked well with
Granada in the past we are very much looking forward to a similarly productive
relationship with ITV.  We have a shared desire to grow telephony revenues by
developing innovative, compelling formats and we are delighted to be assisting
ITV harness the huge potential of interactive television."

Ian McCulloch, Managing Director of Operations for ITV Broadcasting, commented:

"We have appointed Eckoh as our partner in this area after a rigorous process
and I believe they are best placed to help us take the telephony services
business forward. I am confident that they bring us the necessary technical
capability and expertise which is essential to maximising the potential
opportunity and we are very excited about what we can do together"

For further enquiries, please contact


Eckoh Technologies plc                                      Tel: [phone]
Martin Turner, Chief Executive Officer
Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer
Brian McArthur Muscroft, Finance Director

Buchanan Communications                                     Tel: [phone]
Mark Edwards/Jeremy Garcia

Notes to Editors

About Eckoh Technologies:

Eckoh Technologies plc designs, builds, hosts and manages Speech Solutions for
large corporations and organisations using ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) and
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technologies. It is a leading UK service
provider and infrastructure owner/operator, and intends to exploit the
anticipated growth in demand for Speech Solutions across Europe.

In January 2003, Eckoh signed a landmark deal to create an exclusive speech
alliance with BT to provide hosted speech recognition solutions to their
corporate client base over the next 2 years. This contract was then subsequently
extended until December 2006. A two-year contract with TD Waterhouse for a
speech recognition share check service was announced by BT and Eckoh in October
2003.

In June 2003 Eckoh enlarged its call processing infrastructure to 7,000 lines
(capable of handling 500,000 calls an hour) by installing another platform into
a BT hosting facility. This created the largest speech enabled call processing
platform in Europe.

Eckoh has secured contracts to supply hosted Speech Solutions to clients
including Virgin Mobile, Centrica, William Hill, Wyevale Garden Centres and the
RNIB.

Eckoh also operates the following businesses:

*          IVR - following the acquisition of Intelliplus Group plc in Sept
2003, Eckoh is one of the largest providers of managed IVR and SMS services in
the UK to media clients including the BBC, Channel 4, Chrysalis, Endemol, EMAP,
Johnston Press and Cartoon Network.

*          Network Services - under the "Symphony" and "Freecom" brands, Eckoh
supplies fixed line and mobile telephony services, broadband and data services
to SMEs in the UK and Ireland. Following the acquisition of Intelliplus Network
Services now has an SME customer base of over 13,000.

In the year to 31 March 2003 Eckoh Technologies plc generated a turnover of #55
million and had a cash balance of #12m. In December the company announced deals
worth over #6 million covering a range of clients including the Royal National
Institute for the Blind.

Further information can be found at www.eckoh.com.


                      This information is provided by RNS
            The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
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