Nuance Speech Recognition Beats Another Texting Champion, Shows Range by Defeating British Racing Legend Perry ‘The Stig’ McCarthy in Driving Competition

Cannes, France, April 27, 2007 - Nuance Communications, Inc., leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions, today announced the results of two amazing match-ups of ‘man vs. machine’ held at Conversations Europe, their annual European speech conference. Nuance first took on the previous world texting champion in October of 2006 in a competition referred to as the Amazing Race. This new competition challenged one of the newest texting champions and expanded to competitive driving to demonstrate the range of speech applications.

One of Britain’s top racing drivers, Perry McCarthy, also known as ‘the Stig’ from the famous BBC TV-show Top Gear (the secret racing driver in black), took his chances against a contestant who was able to use speech recognition to conduct a number of device-related tasks while driving around a simulated course. Speed was not the critical measurement in this competition, but rather minimizing distraction and ensuring safety by allowing the driver to keep his hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

Drivers were timed while performing tasks such as finding and playing a song on their device - an iPod and a MP3-enabled phone - without crashing their vehicle. Drivers received their assignments using a Nokia 5500 phone, one with, and one without speech applications installed. Nuance Mobile Dictation beat ‘The Stig’ by far, sending a clear message about how speech enhances the safety of using your phone while driving. Whereas Perry McCarthy crashed 27 times, the Nuance driver finished the course without any mishaps.

In the other match-up of man vs. machine, the recently crowned West Coast Champion of the LG National Texting Championship, Eli Tirosh, using an LGenV, challenged a Nuance employee demonstrating Nuance Mobile Dictation, the speech recognition technology that allows mobile phone users to create text messages using speech. Contestants were scored based on the time required to complete the entry of the exact text messages, including appropriate spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Nuance Mobile crushed the texting champion in each of the two rounds of messaging:

• Message 1: “Just last week, there was a text messaging competition in New York City. Today, the west coast champion is racing against speech technology. Who will win? :-)” – Eli Tirosh 50:17 seconds; Nuance Mobile Messaging: 21:83 seconds.
• Message 2: “Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious – How many of you out in the audience even know how to spell that word?” – Eli Tirosh 24:00 seconds; Nuance Mobile Messaging: 13:49 seconds.

Nuance Automotive

Nuance offers the most complete, integrated suite of technologies and services to enable voice-activated dialing, voice destination entry for navigation systems, vehicle command and control, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. The speech recognition and text-to-speech software deliver state-of-the-art performance and a rich set of features and tools tailored for the highly demanding automotive environment. Nuance’s automotive speech solutions have been successfully implemented in more than 5 million cars worldwide, representing more than 100 automobile models from more than 25 automobile brands from all major car manufacturers, including DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Ford, Nissan and Renault, as well as quality Tier 1 suppliers, such as Aisin AW, Alpine, Bosch Blaupunkt, Bury, Denso, Magneti Marelli and Microsoft.

Nuance Mobile Dictation

Nuance Mobile Dictation is an application built upon the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform. It features “dictate anywhere” functionality on Windows Mobile and Symbian OSs, allowing users to dictate wherever they see a blinking cursor on their device screen. Nuance Mobile Dictation can also be ported to other OSs and applications.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit Nuance.com.

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