Market-Leading Text-to-Speech Solution Delivers E-mail, Contacts, Appointments and Data to Thousands of Subscribers via Fixed-line and Mobile Phones

BERLIN, Germany and GENT, Belgium, January 9, 2003 - ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), a leading supplier of imaging, speech and language solutions, today announced that 8hertz Technologies GmbH, a German voice business enabler company, has selected ScanSoft RealSpeak™ as the text-to-speech voice for the Freemail-Portals service from glonz.com GmbH & CoKG, a Germany-based portal technology company. 8hertz Technologies will integrate RealSpeak into glonz.com subscriber solutions that deliver e-mail, contacts, appointments and data to users using fixed-line and mobile phones.

With today's global workforce trending toward the need for around-the-clock access to personal information, the glonz.com service provides individuals with the ability to quickly improve their personal productivity through an innovative and easy-to-use service.

"The glonz.com communication portal has completed a successful pilot and deployment, with very positive acceptance from its growing subscriber base," said Jackson Bond, General Manager for 8hertz. "A significant contributor to the success of the service is ScanSoft RealSpeak, with its unmatched human-sounding German and English speech capabilities and its production-level performance."

ScanSoft RealSpeak is the industry's preeminent text-to-speech engine for converting text to human-sounding synthesized speech, offering unmatched support for 20 languages. RealSpeak has proven itself as a highly scalable solution within a wide range of applications from leading organizations, including the FIFA World Cup, Nortel, Ericsson, IBM and CMG Wireless.

"ScanSoft is pleased to provide the text-to-speech technologies behind this exciting personal information management service," said Peter Hauser, senior vice president and general manager for ScanSoft International. "This is another example of how RealSpeak and ScanSoft's speech solutions can play an important role in helping us get the most from our personal and professional time."

The Freemail-Portals service from glonz.com can be accessed from any telephone in Germany or from abroad at + 49 1805-404 917 at 0.12 EUR per minute, plus fees for international calls. For more information on the service please visit www.glonz.com.

About ScanSoft® RealSpeak™

ScanSoft's RealSpeak is the market-leading product for converting text into human-sounding synthesized speech. The technology is used for a wide range of applications, including delivering emails for unified messaging systems, providing prompts for interactive voice response (IVR) applications, and speech-enabling mobile, automotive, game and PC/multi-media applications. ScanSoft RealSpeak offers unmatched support for hardware systems, including Hitachi, Intel® (Pentium®, Strong ARM® and XScale®), MIPS® and NEC®, as well as operating systems, including Linux®, Microsoft® Windows® and Windows® CE, and Sun Solaris®.

RealSpeak offers a single, standardized application programming interface (API) that enables the deployment of speech-enabled applications in 19 languages: US and UK English, German, French, Dutch & Belgian Dutch, Castilian and Mexican Spanish, Italian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Danish and Cantonese & Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

About 8hertz GmbH

8hertz technologies GmbH, the Voice Business Enabler turns visions into reality, using the simplest man machine interface possible: speech. 8hertz develops a range of innovative, easy-to-use products and services, combining speaker-independent, natural speech recognition with modern telecommunication and Internet technologies. For more information please visit www.8hertz.de.

About glonz.com

glonz.com is a portal technology provider with products for Personal Information Management, Groupware, Information- and Content Management. With glonz.com companies create Intranet-Solutions, Websites and Customer or Sales-Portals. The software is in use by more than 5000 people and is available in English and German and starting in March 2003 in additional languages such as Spanish, French and Italian. Glonz.com is based on open technologies. For more information please visit www.glonz.com/

About ScanSoft Inc.

ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) is a 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 more information regarding ScanSoft® products and technologies, please visit www.scansoft.com.

Trademark reference: ScanSoft and RealSpeak are registered trademarks or trademarks of ScanSoft Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

ScanSoft notes that the statements in this release that relate to future plans, events, performance, including without limitation projected shipment dates or, customers' opting to upgrade to newer or more fully featured products are forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the ScanSoft's actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, market acceptance, engineering delays, quality assurance testing delays, contractual negotiations, successful completion of beta site testing, the scheduling of orders, changes in operating systems, a significant change in the competitive environment, timely delivery by component suppliers and other risks detailed from time to time in the ScanSoft's SEC reports. Readers are cautioned not to place undo reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

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