Media Centre

Call Genie and Spoken Communications Announce Partnership Agreement

March 12, 2008

Combined solution allows consumers to find information faster and more efficiently

Toronto, Ontario and San Diego, California (Voice Search Conference), March 12, 2008 - Call Genie Inc. [TSX:GNE], a leading provider of local search and advertising solutions, and Spoken Communications, a leading provider of human call center agent and speech technology, today announced at the Voice Search Conference 2008 a partnership to provide a next generation voice solution that integrates automation with human silent agents to deliver a better consumer experience.

The hybrid speech automation provides proactive assistance to understand the exact reason and meaning for the caller’s query to help them reach the most relevant advertising and business listing results in a pleasant and effective manner.

Under the terms of the agreement, Call Genie will integrate its CG Interact and OpenAgent products with Spoken’s Guided Self-Service^® technology.  The combined solution, which integrates the human call center agents with speech technology enabling silent agents to handle multiple calls simultaneously, is expected to deliver a better consumer experience at a significantly reduced cost to the carrier.

"Enhancing the overall consumer experience is an important component of our local search and advertising business at Call Genie," said Michael Durance, CEO of Call Genie. "Spoken’s Guided Self Service Solution will allow us to achieve even higher call completion rates for our customers which, in turn, will increase the number of advertising opportunities for merchants.” 

Spoken’s Guided Speech IVR^® works by integrating automation with silent human agents, called Guides. This approach results in a Guided Self-Service that is a short, smooth caller experience that works virtually every time.  Basically, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) captures caller utterances and queues them to an agent for call handling without a need to speak to the caller directly.

“Spoken's Guided Speech delivers a pleasant caller experience that works and is cost effective,” said Gilad Odinak, CEO of Spoken. “With good experience, people keep calling.”

Developed to allow ‘ready to transact’ consumers to connect with local businesses ‘anytime, anywhere,’ Call Genie’s local search and advertising solution allows publishers and advertising companies to offer highly effective, priority placement and pay for performance (PFP) campaigns to their advertisers.  With an intuitive, voice and data user interface and highly accurate business category search capability, Call Genie is ideally suited to provide consumers with relevant merchant results.  In addition to providing superior automation results, Call Genie provides a full multi-modal content delivery capability that includes voice and data presentation of results and direct merchant call connect.

Call Genie’s solutions were specifically designed to allow directory assistance providers, Yellow Pages publishers, search engine companies, and wireless carriers to offer a multi-modal business search experience to their customers.  These solutions can be delivered as part of a traditional directory assistance experience or as a vanity number that leverages a publisher’s print and / or IYP offering.

About Call Genie Inc.

Call Genie is a leading provider of local search and advertising solutions to Yellow Pages publishers, directory assistance providers, and wireless carriers. These solutions enable companies to offer an exceptional experience for both advertisers and consumers.  Call Genie won the Yellow Page Association Industry Excellence Award for Marketing Innovation in North America, the Whitaker Innovation Award in Europe, and the 118 Tracker Award for Technology Innovation in the UK. Call Genie has over 30 customers in 11 countries.  For more information, visit www.callgenie.com.

About Spoken Communications

Spoken Communications provides the only Guided Self-Service(tm) Solution that fully integrates the human call center agent and speech technology so agents are able to handle multiple calls -- silently and simultaneously. This innovative approach, developed by Spoken, ensures call centers and their customers will have self-service success.  Spoken Communications is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. When the caller experience matters, Spoken Communications is the only choice. For more information please visit www.spoken.com.

For More Information

Call Genie Inc.

Mark McCormack, Media Relations 

Tel: +1 720 320 1161

Email: mark.mccormack@callgenie.com 

or

Alex Blodgett, Investor Relations 

Tel: +1 403 410 6875

Email: alex.blodgett@callgenie.com 

 

Spoken Communications

Tonia Lopez-Song

Phone: +1 425 679 0696

Email: spokenpr@spoken.com

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