West Interactive Adds Natural Language Speech Solutions

Current Deployments Generating Strong, Positive, Award-Winning Results

(Omaha, Neb. August 7, 2006) - West Interactive, a division of West Corporation, today announced the national rollout of its Natural Language speech solutions as part of its suite of services. West Interactive has already launched several customized large-scale client applications using Natural Language technology, including one that recently garnered an award from Speech Technology magazine.

A typical natural language application system asks open-ended questions (i.e. "How can I help you"?); Callers speak the purpose of their call in a natural phrase or sentence, and then proceed through relevant self-service applications or routed to an appropriate agent.

Natural Language - The Business Advantage

Natural language speech applications generate benefits for enterprises and their callers:

• Shorter overall "time-to-resolution" for callers = more satisfied customers
• Fewer zero-outs and inter-agent transfers
• Leveraging existing investments in automated solutions
• Consolidation of 800 numbers for a single point of contact

"Natural Language isn't as easy as simply installing new software or adding new hardware," said Bruce Pollock, Vice President of Expert Solutions Group at West Interactive. "The expertise it takes to develop is significant, but so are the advantages to the end-user and company. Our customers have enjoyed positive results with natural language, both from a call routing perspective as well as self-service resolution rates."

Natural Language - How it Works

Unlike traditional speech recognition systems that dominate the market today, callers are not forced into specific options. Callers have more perceived control - they tell the system what to do in their own words.

Natural language speech applications use a statistical model to understand caller intent in the context of your business. They provide robustness unavailable in a guided system - for example, callers can hesitate, re-start and re-state their statements and still be successful.

Developing Natural Language applications is a step-by-step process, starting from application discovery then data collection, dialog and grammar design, usability testing, deployment, tuning and maintenance. Each process is individually important; however usability testing is among the most critical to system performance.

"West Interactive has deployed three natural language speech applications in the past eight months and is an industry leader in this field," added Pollock. "We're helping our customers to improve service and reduce costs, and our quick deployment times and high quality applications are bringing fast time-to-benefit for our customers, which is critical in the competitive markets in which they operate."

About West Interactive

West Interactive is a wholly owned subsidiary of West Corporation and offers companies a full suite of automated customer contact solutions that help improve customer acquisition and customer care. Services are offered as hosted or managed and applications include interactive voice response, automated notifications, DTMF, natural language speech and customer survey tools. West Interactive is located in Omaha, Nebraska and is one of the nations leading providers of automated customer contact solutions and services many Fortune 1000 clients in nearly every vertical market.

For more information, please visit www.westinteractive.com or call 1-800-841-9000.

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