Press Release

Canon's Speech Application From TuVox Named Most Innovative Solution

CUPERTINO, Calif. - August 8, 2006 - TuVox, a leading provider of On Demand speech applications, today announced that Canon U.S.A., Inc.'s deployment of TuVox Perfect Router, an award-winning conversational call routing application, received Speech Technology Magazine's fourth annual Most Innovative Solution Award. The award recipients, including Canon, will be honored at an awards ceremony presentation today as part of SpeechTEK 2006 being held at the New York Marriott Marquis from August 7-10.

Each year Speech Technology Magazine and STM NewsBlast solicit readers to nominate the most innovative speech applications deployed by enterprise and service providers around the world. From those nominations, a panel of distinguished judges representing Speech Technology Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board scores the top 10 deployments whose applications demonstrate creativity and innovation.

"Speech Technology Magazine is proud to present the Most Innovative Solutions Awards to companies that are recognizing impressive results from their speech technology deployments," said David Myron, editor-in-chief of Speech Technology Magazine and CRM magazine. "Congratulations to this year's award winners. Their successful implementations serve as proof to other companies that well deployed speech applications can bring great business value to companies."

Canon's speech solution is comprised of TuVox Perfect Router and Aspect's CSS platform - a customer service solution extremely novel in the consumer electronic industry. By allowing callers to simply say what they are calling for, TuVox Perfect Router identifies caller intent and what product they are calling about, and routes calls for Canon technical support, repair, products and accessories to the appropriate agent. With the TuVox speech application, the percentage of calls manually routed by live agents dropped from 42 percent with touch-tone to 27 percent. Adoption of automated phone customer service by Canon customers is rising with nearly 75 percent of customers choosing to route their calls using speech instead of the traditional touchtone offering.

"This award is a testament to TuVox's commitment to delivering quality speech solutions that replace frustrating touch-tone IVR and to helping our customers deliver a world class caller experience," said Larry Miller, president and CEO of TuVox. "We are excited about our work with Canon to create a sophisticated voice self-service solution that truly reflects the company's brand and passion for customer service and congratulate them on receiving this prestigious award from Speech Technology Magazine."

To read the full story on the 2006 Most Innovative Solutions winners, click here.

About Speech Technology Magazine
Speech Technology Magazine and SpeechTEK Exposition and Educational Conference are recognized worldwide as the leading sources of information on the products and technologies affecting the speech technology industry. The bi-monthly trade publication and the annual trade show deliver essential news to end-users of the technology; value added resellers, integrators, developers, investors and other professionals.

About Canon USA Inc.
Canon U.S.A., Inc. delivers consumer, business-to-business, and industrial imaging solutions. The Company is listed as one of Fortune's Most Admired Companies in America and is rated #35 on the BusinessWeek list of "Top 100 Brands." Its parent company Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ) is a top patent holder of technology, ranking second overall in the U.S. in 2005, with global revenues of $31.8 billion. For more information, www.usa.canon.com.

About TuVox
TuVox is a leading provider of On Demand speech applications, empowering companies to deliver superior caller experience through the voice channel. Available as a hosted or on-premise solution, TuVox's award winning applications are easily customized to your business and can quickly be updated in response to business changes. TuVox speech applications automate virtually any type of call, including natural language call-routing, self-service transactions and interactive customer support. By delivering a superior caller experience, TuVox speech applications increase customer satisfaction and improve the adoption of voice self-service. TuVox customers include companies such as ABN-AMRO, AvMed, British Airways, Canon, Charter Communications, Gateway, Netflix, Office Depot, Time Customer Service and TiVo.