Big Sky Technologies Announces Release of Remark! Voice Server V3.0

SAN DIEGO, CA, February 20, 2003 — Big Sky Technologies today announced the First Customer Shipment of the latest release of the Remark! Voice Server, which provides voice and telephony services for IBM (NYSE:IBM) Lotus Notes and Domino based applications. Version 3.0 includes several significant new features, and ensures Big Sky's continued dominance in the Notes and Domino based voice processing market. The Remark! Voice Server is a Microsoft Windows based voice processing system that hosts Unified Messaging and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications.

Big Sky continues to innovate by adding support for Cisco's CallManager IP PBX system. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) based platforms like CallManager allow voice processing resources to connect to other VoIP based voice devices, such as IP telephones, over the local area network (LAN) without the need for special PBX hardware and voice boards. The resulting cost savings is one of the reasons software based IP PBX systems are gaining a significant share of the telephone equipment market.

With this new release, customers can support more than one application on a single Remark! Voice Server. This allows customers to easily mix off-the-shelf applications (such as the Remark! Unified MessagingAssistant messaging application) and custom IVR applications such as help desks or sales hotlines. Applications can be started based on the line the call is received on, or based on the phone number dialed by the caller.

Support has also been added for ScanSoft's RealSpeak Text-to-Speech software. This enhancement has been requested by customers to provide a more natural sounding voice when listening to e-mail messages or other text content over the phone.

The following new features have been added with V3.0:

• Support for Cisco CallManager. The Remark! Voice Server can be configured to connect to Cisco CallManager without the need for special voice processing boards. CallManager is supported in addition to existing support for NMS Communications and Intel / Dialogic voice processing boards.
• Ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. Customers can now run custom applications, such as a help desk and sales force automation applications, alongside Remark! Unified MessagingAssistant on a single server.
• ScanSoft RealSpeak Text-to-Speech support. RealSpeak is a premium TTS offering that provides realistic voice quality for playback of e-mail messages and other text content. Now ScanSoft's RealSpeak or TruVoice TTS options are available.
• Lotus Notes and Domino 6 support. Notes and Domino 6 is the latest version of the premier collaboration and messaging application platform from IBM.
• Support for two highly compressed voice formats. The Remark! Voice Server now supports the DSP Group's TruSpeech and Microsoft's GSM 6.10 voice formats providing highly compressed voice files for new recordings. Each of these new formats provide approximately 1 kbyte/second data rates bringing the storage required for a typical 30 second message to about 30 kbytes.

CONTACT
Thomas Krier
Big Sky Technologies, Inc.
858-715-5026
tkrier@bigskytech.com

About Big Sky Technologies
San Diego-based Big Sky Technologies was founded in 1994 and is a privately held California corporation. The company is a leading supplier of solutions that integrate the telephone and voice with Lotus Notes and Domino on both the corporate data network and Internet. Big Sky provides a broad range of unified communications and workgroup IVR solutions to enhance communications and collaboration within the workgroup and enterprise. Big Sky maintains a site on the World Wide Web at www.bigskytech.com.

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Remark! is a registered trademark and Unified MessagingAssistant and MessagingAssistant are trademarks of Big Sky Technologies, Inc.

IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation and/or IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. All other trademarks are owned by their respective companies.