Re Agreement

RNS Number:7324S
Vocalis Group PLC
19 October 2000


             Vocalis Group plc announce agreement with HOPEWISER              

Vocalis Group plc ("Vocalis"), the international speech technology group,
today announces a partnership agreement with HOPEWISER, a provider of address
management & consultancy solutions, to jointly develop their Call Centre
Solutions portfolio.

The agreement means that HOPEWISER will be able to offer speech recognition
within their solutions, and Vocalis will be able to include the HOPEWISER
address management suite of products in its Intelligent Query Engine (IQe)
Call Centre Solutions portfolio.  Both companies will jointly market the
combined product portfolios.

"HOPEWISER is one of the major players in the address management market, and
we are confident that this collaboration will enable us to jointly benefit
from each others expertise, technologies and markets," comments Minesh Patel,
Chief Technical Officer of Vocalis.

"HOPEWISER address management products deliver address accuracy, reliability
and speed that will perfectly complement Vocalis IQe Call Centre solutions."

Andy Smart, Regional Sales Manager for HOPEWISER comments, "The collaboration
with Vocalis will enable us to stay at the leading edge of our industry, and
continue to offer our clients the best possible address management solutions. 
We are very excited about the potential benefits of adding speech recognition
to our solutions."

The Vocalis IQe is a suite of applications designed specifically for the Call
Centre environment that can reduce the time a call centre agent spends with
callers, offering the potential for huge productivity increases.  The
technology, which has been developed by Vocalis and has a patent pending, asks
the caller specific questions and using Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR)
takes the callers responses and matches them against customer records.  This
enables the caller to be accurately identified before they are connected to an
Agent.  All relevant information about the caller can then be sent to the
computer screen of the agent handling the call.  Automation of this type of
query has, to date, been impossible within the speech recognition industry. 
The accuracy levels achieved by Vocalis IQe can be higher than that achieved
by human agents. The IQe-Postcode application, which requests the caller's
postcode and street name, is the first application to be available on the IQe
platform.

The IQe technology is based on Vocalis SpeechWare, the state of the art
Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, offering both software and
hardware based variants, enabling call centres to easily integrate ASR
facilities into their existing services.

About Hopewiser

HOPEWISER was the first Royal Mail Value Added Reseller to provide address
management software based around the 26 million addresses contained on the
Postcode Address File (PAF), and has since remained at the forefront of
development within the industry.  HOPEWISER clients include The Automobile
Association, RAC, British Gas and BT.

About Vocalis

Vocalis Group plc, as a leading speech technology group, builds a range of
voice activated telephony products for customers around the world. Vocalis was
formed in 1993 and has been trading on the London Stock Exchange since July
1996. 
The Vocalis technologies areas include: -

SpeechWare, Vocalis' proprietary third generation advanced speech recognition
technology, which is available to purchase under license. This is fully
supported with toolkits and is available in most of the languages across the
globe. The Intelligent Query Engine is an integral part of Vocalis SpeechWare
and offers a platform for applications designed to increase efficiency in the
call centre environment, for example the postcoder application.
The Website is http://www.vocalisspeechware.com 

SPEECHtel is a platform with voice activated service applications for call
centres and telephone operators around the world. These include both operator
services and value added services, such as directory assistance, unified
messaging and voice dialling. The Intelligent Query Engine offers a platform
for applications designed to increase efficiency in the call centre
environment for example the postcoder application.
 The Website is http://www.speechtel.com 

Vocalis' Internet Product range allows access to information on the Internet
by simply picking up the telephone and hearing the information. SpeecHTML
allows companies to offer a telephone number which people can call to access
the information on the Website, which they can then interact with using spoken
commands. SpeechMail enables people to call and access their e-mail messages;
they can hear them, reply and delete them using simple spoken commands.
The Websites are http://www.speechtml.com and http://www.speechmail.co.uk
The Vocalis Website is at http://www.vocalis.com.

Philippa Buttle
Vocalis Group plc 
Tel:   [phone]
Email: [e-mail]


JP Burgun/Caroline Evans-Jones
ICIS
Tel:   [phone]
Email: [e-mail]