New York - SpeechTEK — September 15, 2004 — Today, Vail Systems, an industry leader in voice hosting as well as speech application development, announced that the company will host the SpeechTEK and OPUS Research Speech Solutions Challenge Portal on its SIP-based VoiceXML and SALT hosting platform. Vail Systems also designed and architected the portal application, which directs callers to one of the nine participating teams in the Speech Solutions Challenge by name.

We appreciate Vail Systems' support of the Speech Solutions CHALLENGE II," said Dan Miller, senior analyst at OPUS Research. "Vail's willingness to host the CHALLENGE II Portal has made it possible for us to put together a very sophisticated, innovative and successful demonstration of the power of speech technology."

Vail will provide connectivity to the Challenge via the traditional PSTN and also through pure VoIP using Level(3) Communications' (LVLT) softswitch network, which obviates the need for traditional telephony hardware and enables Vail to provide carrier-grade hosting service at drastically reduced cost. Interested parties can reach the SpeechTEK Speech Solutions Challenge Portal at (866) 203-0527 (PSTN) or (866) 216-9851 through Level(3)'s VoIP network.

"The Speech Solutions Challenge has quickly become one of the bellwether events of our industry and we are proud to be the voice of the competition," said Jim Whiteley, President and CEO of Vail Systems. "You'll the hear the work of some of the industry's top enterprise speech developers in this contest and we think our platform, with its distributed VoIP infrastructure, its carrier softswitch connectivity and support for standards-based applications, is an ideal place for such applications to reside."

This dual-site platform, located at Vail's headquarters in Deerfield, IL and co-located with Level(3)'s facility in downtown Chicago, utilizes a building-block approach, delivering N+N redundancy and rapid scalability to accommodate spikes in application traffic, as demonstrated in Vail's outbound notification and entirely-software-based conferencing applications. The platform also provides PSTN and IP connectivity for standards-based applications written in SALT and VoiceXML, as well as packaged applications for Microsoft Speech Server.

Vail Systems delivers flexible speech application development and hosting solutions that significantly lower the cost of contact center automation and other interactive phone-based services. With Vail packaged applications, companies have the tools to jump-start their speech strategy and realize compelling results quickly and affordably. Our voice hosting services are powered by a proven carrier-grade SIP VoIP platform and include 24/7 monitoring and real-time application reporting. Providing next generation IVR solutions for over 10 years, Vail is the reliable choice in speech. For additional information, call (800) 360-VAIL (8245) or visit: .