Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 7, 2001

Philips Speech Processing announced today that two of its leading products have each won a 2000 Product of the Year Award in the speech recognition category.

SpeechPearl(R) received a 2000 Product of the Year award from Communications Solutions Magazine, and SpeechMania(R) accepted the same honor from Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine. SpeechPearl was also distinguished with the 2001 Editors' Choice Award from Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine.

The SpeechPearl 2000 engine was just recently made available and is designed to enable interactive voice response (IVR) systems to understand people as they speak naturally, in their own words. Developed for the entire range of telephony speech applications, from numbers and individual words to continuous natural speech, the SpeechPearl engine is recommended for telecom applications including automated directory assistance, voice access to white pages and yellow pages, messaging systems, voice portals and customer service call centers.

SpeechMania 2000, winner of the Customer Interaction Solutions Product of the Year Award, is an advanced speech recognition platform that allows users to speak naturally when using automated, telephone-based information and transaction systems and conduct intelligent, human-like dialogs. This new version further improves the recognition performance and capabilities of the popular SpeechMania 99 platform and is based on Philips' TrueDialog(TM) technology. SpeechMania is developed for and used by a variety of organizations including telecom carriers that provide voice portals or speech-enabled customer care services; banks or financial service providers; and companies in the transportation industry.

According to Tim Walsh, vice president of sales and marketing, "We are extremely honored that these two key publications have taken notice of our products, and awarded both SpeechPearl and SpeechMania as 2000 Products of the Year, and SpeechPearl as 2001 Editors' Choice. Receiving this great recognition only further validates our leading role in the speech recognition community, and we plan to continue surpassing industry expectations in 2001 by introducing new, innovative speech enabled customer care applications."

About Philips Speech Processing

Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics, is a pioneer and global leader in speech recognition, natural dialogue and language understanding technologies, with more than 40 years experience in the development and marketing of speech products. Philips offers a broad portfolio of speech technology solutions to the telecommunications, IT, automotive and consumer electronics industries. As a developer and provider of speech technologies in multiple languages, Philips has the largest installed base of speech recognition and natural language understanding systems in Europe, and is the largest provider of speech technology in the Americas and other regions of the world. Installations include call center services automation, telephony applications, professional dictation solutions, voice controlled devices and Internet applications. Visit www.speech.philips.com for additional information.

About Philips

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of EUR 31.5 billion in 1999. It is a global leader in color television sets, lighting, electric shavers, color picture tubes for televisions and monitors, and one-chip TV products. Its 239,370 employees in more than 60 countries are active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors and medical systems. Philips is quoted on the NYSE (symbol: PHG), London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and other stock exchanges. News from Philips is located at www.news.philips.com.