ASCENT COMPUTING GROUP RELEASES NEXT-GENERATION VOICE APPLICATION PLATFORM

Announces Availability of AscenTel 2.0 and the AscenTel Call Manager, a Call Center-Ready Platform

White Plains, NY -- September 30, 2002 -- Ascent Computing Group, an Inc. 500 and a Fast 500 company, announced the availability of AscenTel 2.0 today. The latest release of the company's unique voice technology product, AscenTel 2.0 offers companies of all sizes a cost-effective way to enhance telephone communications with customers and partners through the use of speech recognition technology. Additionally, Ascent Computing Group has also released Version 1.0 of its Call Manager, an Application Development Framework, which comes packaged with an auto-attendant dynamic call routing application that is based on AscenTel 2.0.

The AscenTel Call Manager Application provides an integrated telephony and IT framework for deploying and maintaining speech recognition applications within the enterprise, based on the VoiceXML standard.  By deploying AscenTel Call manager, any PBX can be converted into a high-end customer service system.

"Any enterprise, organization, or institute that needs to provide access to its data for customers, members, or students via the telephone will benefit greatly from this latest release," said Sunil Nikhar, CEO of Ascent Computing Group. "AscenTel Call Manager’s predefined VoiceXML speech recognition applications and tools set makes providing voice access to enterprise and web application dramatically easier and cheaper. In addition to that the management of telephone IVR applications, including speech recognition tuning capability and adding new speech applications, should already be within the skills of existing support teams."

Ascent has the industry experience, business stability, and customer base to take on the market at a time when other companies are downsizing, being acquired, or going out of business," said Jonathan Eisenzopf, founder of The Ferrum Group, a respected industry analyst firm. "With this release, Ascent Computing Group represents the new breed of Web and IVR solution providers that are capable of integrating the call center with the rest of the enterprise. Until now, these functional marketplaces have been segmented and served by different providers."  

AscenTel 2.0

Currently, AscenTel 2.0 is under deployment at various client locations in US as well as overseas. Since its launch in November 2001, the AscenTel platform has evolved into a functionally rich solution designed to meet customers’ needs. By offering users a broad set of functions that they can use today and leverage into the future, the AscenTel 2.0 has been able to gain traction with its customer base and has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Product Features

Key features introduced by AscenTel 2.0 include:

• Enhanced OA&M tool and SNMP support
• Integration with multiple computer-telephone integration (CTI) middleware frameworks, including CT-Connect, TAPI middleware, and Genesis T-serv
• Nuance 8.0 and Philips 8.0 recognizer support

Product Benefits

Deployment of AscenTel 2.0 delivers multiple benefits:

•           AscenTel 2.0 can be deployed in any call center environment -- its superior Call Manager application ensures a high level of customer satisfaction as well as significant cost and time savings in dealing with incoming calls.

•           AscenTel 2.0 makes deploying new speech recognition applications much easier with the improved application development framework than traditional DTMF-based interactive voice response (IVR) systems (which require a great deal of specialized knowledge and equipment to develop and deploy).

•           Enterprise clients can integrate AscenTel with their existing enterprise applications and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

•           The AscenTel Call Manager provides tools for easy development of multiple voice applications running on a single platform.

Pricing and Availability

AscenTel 2.0 and AscenTel Call Manager are available now, with a flexible pricing scheme determined by several factors, the most important of which being the number of ports on the system. The pricing structure is designed so that additional applications can be deployed on the same server, with a very minor incremental cost to the client.

About Ascent Computing Group (www.ascent-inc.com)

Ascent Computing Group is the leading provider of both voice-based business application software and business IT consulting services. Voice is the simplest way to interact with enterprise data at any time, from any place, and from any phone. By using AscenTel, a VoiceXML platform, Ascent can uniquely voice-enable all business applications running under any operating system. Headquartered in White Plains, New York, Ascent has been developing and deploying business solutions for world-class companies since 1994 and has the distinction of being designated as an Inc. 500 and a Fast 500 Company.

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