BBN Technologies

Cambridge, Mass., March 8, 2005 — BBN Technologies, a leading advanced technology and research and development firm, today announced that its AVOKE™ STX speech-to-text system earned the AVIOS Best Technology for Audio Search Award at SpeechTEK West, where the technology was demonstrated.

"The availability of AVOKE STX enables a new era in multimedia search," said Alex Laats, president of BBN Technologies Delta Division. "BBN is delighted to have its technology recognized as 'the best' by an organization as respected in the industry as AVIOS."

AVOKE STX enables multimedia search with standard Web interfaces by transforming audio into a rich transcription that can be searched and analyzed easily. At the core of the system is BBN's very large vocabulary speech recognition engine, which is the most accurate, speaker independent, continuous speech recognition engine commercially available in the world. Applications for this technology include enterprise search, government intelligence, consumer search, broadcast news monitoring, and call center recording, among others.

AVIOS is a 23-year-old, not-for-profit professional membership organization founded as the American Voice Input/Output Society, with the name later changed to reflect growing international participation. For much of this time, the AVIOS annual conference was the only forum dedicated to practical applications of advanced speech technology (going beyond basic research). The conference has matured into AVIOS-SpeechTEK Spring through a partnership with AmComm Publications, the publisher of Speech Technology Magazine.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for over 50 years.

Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad hoc networking, the semantic web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information on BBN Technologies, visit www.bbn.com.