First Commercial Imaging Developer Toolkit to Support Latin, Cyrillic and Asian OCR in a Single Framework; Market-Leading Solution Increases Accuracy by Over 25 Percent, Speed by Over 30 Percent

New York -- April 7, 2003 - ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), a leading supplier of imaging, speech and language solutions, today announced the ScanSoft® Capture Development System 12 at the AIIM Exposition and Conference in New York. Used to add scanning and imaging capabilities to software applications, the new release adds support for Asian OCR (optical character recognition), enhances support for PDF (portable document format), improves accuracy by over 25 percent, and increases performance by over 30 percent. It also includes support for a wide range of input/output filters, including PDF, XML and Open eBook standards.

The Capture Development System includes everything needed to add sophisticated imaging, recognition and PDF capabilities to commercial and in-house software applications, significantly speeding time-to-market while lowering development costs. It supports OCR (machine print), ICR (handprint), OMR (checkmark) and barcode recognition, providing multiple engines and advanced recognition-voting capabilities to deliver the most accurate results possible. It also includes pre-made user interfaces for controlling scanning devices, and provides tools that enable advanced image enhancement, de-skew and document processing capabilities.

"The ScanSoft Capture Development System 12 is the most comprehensive OCR and PDF system available for developers today," said Robert Weideman, vice president of worldwide marketing for ScanSoft. "In addition to its wide range of additional features and functions, its new support for Asian OCR significantly expands its value and addresses the growing market requirement for integrating Asian language support into commercial and custom applications."

The ScanSoft Capture Development System is based on the imaging technology within ScanSoft® OmniPage Pro®, the leading application for desktop OCR and PDF conversion. ScanSoft imaging and OCR developer tools are used in nearly all commercial applications that support capture features, including Autodesk® Raster Design, Canon® imageWARE®, Cardiff TELEform®, FileNET Panagon™ Capture, Kofax® Ascent Capture®, Microsoft® Office XP and Microsoft SharePoint®.

"With the Capture Development System 12, ScanSoft has bundled together an impressive selection of features that have the potential to be used in creating some great capture or forms processing solutions. The new Asian language support will expand its usage into interesting and profitable new markets," said Harvey Spencer, President of Harvey Spencer Associates. "I am pleased to see that ScanSoft has included the improved character recognition features, which it introduced with OmniPage 12, as well as the TextBridge® engine. This allows optimum selection of engines to support different character sets, which further increases the accuracy of solutions that use this toolkit."

Key new capabilities and enhancements delivered within the new Capture Development System 12 include:

• Asian Language OCR - The Capture Development System has been significantly expanded to include Asian OCR, offering support for Japanese (hiragana/katakana and kanji), Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Korean language recognition. This new component provides support for black and white, grayscale and color images, and can recognize text in both vertical and horizontal formats. Information provided by the Asian OCR engine and made available to developers for use within their applications include character identities and word and document structure information. XML and text output are provided for all of the supported Asian languages.



• New Selectable OCR Modules - ScanSoft's new Tri-Vote OCR voting capabilities now deliver unprecedented accuracy levels, increasing accuracy by up to 25 percent over the previous version. The Capture Development System also offers unmatched flexibility by allowing developers to select from two multi-engine OCR modules with sophisticated voting capabilities or integrate one of three stand-alone OCR engines individually. Never before has this level of flexibility been available to developers, offering unmatched accuracy levels and application specific OCR module selection capabilities.



• Speed Management Features - With the new speed management controls now available in the Capture Development System 12, developers no longer have to sacrifice image processing speed for accuracy gains. Developers now have the ability to select from 3 individual page parsers, offering varying levels of speed, for highly accurate page decomposition capabilities that separate static documents into text, columns, tables and graphics. Additionally, recognition mode selection capabilities are available for each OCR engine allowing the developer to select from accurate, balanced or fast recognition settings.



• Breakthrough PDF Capabilities - The Capture Development System's robust PDF developer tools offer complete support for importing, converting and creating searchable PDF files, the format of choice for many document retrieval and content management systems. Enhancements to the PDF capabilities of the Capture Development System include a significant improvement in PDF reading speed and near 100 percent character recognition accuracy for the majority of commonly used PDF formats. The Capture Development System supports creating PDF files in multiple formats including PDF Normal (text only), Normal with image substitutes, image only and image plus text, allowing developers to incorporate a wide range of PDF capabilities into their applications.



• New XML Export Filters - XML has emerged as the standard for representing documents and data using a vendor-neutral format. By supporting scan-to-XML and PDF-to-XML capabilities, the Capture Development System allows developers to connect document workflows with database, document management and search applications. Captured data can now be handed off to back end CRM systems created by market leading organizations such as Legato, Gauss, OpenText, Stellent and Vignet.



• Open E-Book Export Filters - This new release offers support for Open eBooks, an important electronic document capability supported by Microsoft, Adobe Systems and other leading commercial, academic and government organizations. By providing support for this format, the Capture Development System offers developers the ability to create applications that allow business documents to be shared, used and protected using commercial eBook readers and digital rights management solutions.



• Scanning Enhancements - Scanning module enhancements also provide support for duplex scanning, double page scanning and color dropout.

The Industry's Most Robust Imaging and PDF Toolkit

• Import/Export: The input subsystem provides scanner and image conversion interfaces and supports conversion for TIFF, PCX, DCX, BMP, PNG, JPEG, PDF, TIFF-FX and PaperPort® MAX image formats. Both color and grayscale images can be handled by the system, and images can be sent from memory to the preprocessing and recognition processes.
  
  The output format can be generic Unicode or ANSI or can be filtered through output conversion modules into popular word processing formats. Over 30 output formats are supported, including Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF, PaperPort MAX, RTF, ASCII and HTML.



• Image Preprocessing: Image preprocessing functions are available to rotate, deskew, invert, and despeckle images. Automatic Page Analysis is offered to separate an image into zones (auto-zoning) and is capable of recommending recognition modules for subsequent processing. Attributes such as language and document structure elements are also provided.



• Specialty Fonts: In addition to offering a choice of 2 multi-engine omnifont OCR recognition modules and 3 individual omnifont OCR engines, recognition modules are also provided for the processing of special machine print fonts including OCR-A, OCR-B and E-13B (MICR), providing high quality recognition on limited font sets.



• ICR: Two enhanced ICR recognition modules are available in the ScanSoft Capture Development System. One supports numbers only and is designed for applications where a restricted character set is required. The second ICR recognition module is designed for alphanumeric hand printed characters of both upper and lower-case handprint of nearly 100 languages, 15 with dictionary support.



• Barcode: The ScanSoft Capture Development System provides recognition support for 13 barcode symbologies allowing developers to build custom applications that offer robust barcode recognition technology. Both 1D and 2D barcodes are supported including PDF-417.



• OMR (Optical Mark Recognition): The ScanSoft Capture Development System provides support for recognizing optical marks. Typical areas of application include questionnaires, educational tests and reporting or ordering sheets, where the documents to be processed are form-like and filled in by respondents.



• Visual Toolbox: An optional set of custom controls is made available through the Visual Toolbox which provides developers with the tools needed for the design of image viewers and correction editors.

Availability

The ScanSoft Capture Development System 12 will ship within 60 days, with pricing starting at $4,495. For more information please visit www.ScanSoft.com/CaptureSDK or call ScanSoft at (1) 800.443.7077.

About ScanSoft, Inc.

ScanSoft, Inc. is the leading supplier of imaging, speech and language solutions that are used to automate a wide range of manual processes-saving time, increasing worker productivity and improving customer service. For additional information on the company, please visit www.scansoft.com.

Trademark reference: ScanSoft, OmniPage Pro, TextBridge, and PaperPort, are trademarks or registered trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The statements in this press release that relate to future plans, events or performance are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including risks associated with market trends, competitive factors, and other risks identified in ScanSoft's SEC filings. Actual results, events and performance may differ materially. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements that speak only as of the date hereof.

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