Nearly 100% of Companies Delivering Imaging Capabilities Select ScanSoft, Including ACOM Solutions, CardScan, Carreker, Metafile, and Vignette

PHILADELPHIA - AIIM 2005 Conference – May 17, 2005 – ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), a global leader of speech and imaging solutions, today announced that the ScanSoft® OmniPage® Capture SDK (software developer kit) 12 continues to gain momentum as the industry’s leading imaging toolkit, and that it has signed licensing agreements with several market leaders, including ACOM Solutions, CardScan, Carreker, Metafile, and Vignette.

The OmniPage Capture SDK has long been the standard for commercial developers to add sophisticated imaging, optical character recognition (OCR) and PDF capabilities to software applications, significantly speeding time-to-market while lowering development costs. Other commercial vendors needing to support imaging features that have selected OmniPage Capture SDK include Accusoft, ActivePDF, Autodesk, Canon, Captiva, DataCap, Freedom Scientific, Hyland Software, IMR, Kofax, Omtool, Microsoft, Westbrook Technologies, Symantec and Xerox. In addition, with scanning, imaging and PDF becoming a mainstream technology, corporate and integrator organizations worldwide have found that they can lower costs and gain better results by developing their own applications through the use of ScanSoft OmniPage Capture SDK. Internal development customers include Avis, Bank of America, Citibank, CNA Canada, E & J Winery, Household Finance Corporation, Lexus Nexis, Lockheed Martin, MasterCard, Raytheon, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and WalMart.

Based on the imaging technology within ScanSoft® OmniPage® Pro, the leading application for desktop OCR and PDF conversion, the OmniPage Capture SDK gives developers access to highly accurate recognition engines, including OCR (machine print), ICR (handprint), OMR (checkmark) and barcode. It also provides high-level recognition-voting interfaces that deliver the most accurate results possible. To enable rapid application development, the toolkit includes pre-made user interfaces for controlling scanning devices, and tools that enable advanced image enhancement, de-skew and document processing capabilities. A wide array of imaging and digital formats are supported by the toolkit, including TIF, various types of PDF, Microsoft Word, XML, HTML and Open eBook.

ScanSoft has several licensing agreements for the OmniPage Capture SDK with market-leading companies:

• ACOM Solutions – ACOM Solutions, which develops, markets and implements advanced modular software systems for edocument management, e-payment management, B2B ecommerce management and e-purchasing management, selected the OmniPage Capture SDK to add sophisticated OCR to its document management solutions.
  
  “As our product offering evolved from a document output solution to an integrated Web-based document management strategy, we needed to add a powerful and flexible OCR capability,” said James R Scott, vice president, general manager, ACOM Solutions. “We felt that the combination of ScanSoft’s OmniPage Capture SDK rich feature set, along with its wide market acceptance, would strengthen our competitive position.”
  
  
• Carreker - Carreker Corporation, a leading provider of technology and consulting solutions for the financial services industry, selected the OmniPage Capture SDK for its Payee Name Verification (PNV) solution, which adds additional security to financial institutions by identifying possible payee name alterations and flagging suspect items for further investigation, significantly reducing the risk of fraudulent checks and enhancing positive pay systems for institutions that use them.
  
  “In our continuing quest to provide best of class solutions, ScanSoft's complementary, advanced imaging capabilities allow us to offer even more fraud protection for our positive pay clients," said Thomas G. Gordon, senior vice president, Risk Solutions Group, Carreker. "Our Payee Name Verification solution provides our customers with a simple, cost-effective solution that is both affordable and reliable. ScanSoft's technology is extremely accurate, and affords our clients a high level of confidence that their transactions are protected.”
  
  
• CardScan – CardScan, Inc., (formerly Corex Technologies, Inc.), the market leader in business card scanning solutions, selected OmniPage Capture SDK for its CardScan business scanner products, which scan and upload data from a business card into the appropriate fields of a database without typing. ScanSoft OmniPage Capture SDK was chosen by Corex to replace a previous OCR solution which along with Corex’s proprietary interpretive scanning technology resulted in superior speed, significant improvements in the use of system memory and an increase in accuracy of 21 percent.
  
  “CardScan customers know that they can always expect the highest levels of accuracy from our products,” said Peter J. Weyman, president of CardScan. “When we looked to improve the OCR engine within CardScan, ScanSoft was the first vendor that we approached. Their advanced imaging capabilities are the perfect complement to our own proprietary technology – the combination of the two award-winning solutions allows our customers to work as efficiently as possible, achieving the highest levels of accuracy and productivity.”
  
  
• Metafile – Metafile Information Systems, Inc., a privately held software development and systems integration company, selected the OmniPage Capture SDK to to add sophisticated OCR to its MetaViewer Enterprise ECM solution.
  
  “The seamless integration, speed and accuracy of ScanSoft's OCR, and its ease of implementation, greatly enhance the capture capabilities of our ECM solution,” said Jim Mandt, vice president, Support Services, Metafile Information Systems, Inc. “Our customers find that it is invaluable for automating the traditionally manual process of indexing scanned documents.”
  
  
• Vignette Corp. – Vignette, a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management solutions, selected the OmniPage Capture SDK to add highly accurate OCR and PDF capabilities to support conversion of print and image data into searchable archives for Vignette? IDM and Vignette? Records & Documents. After evaluating alternatives, Vignette chose to extend its relationship with ScanSoft.
  
  “As a global leader in providing Enterprise Content Management and Portal solutions, Vignette leverages third party components to provide deep functionality in specialized areas such as OCR,” said John MacLean, senior director of product management at Vignette. “ScanSoft is a clear leader in OCR technology, and allows Vignette to offer its customers good recognition rates, performance, reliability, and multiple language support."

ScanSoft OmniPage Capture SDK

Designed for optimal 32-bit application development, the ScanSoft OmniPage Capture SDK is everything a developer needs to quickly add sophisticated imaging, recognition and PDF capabilities to commercial and in-house software applications. It is the number-one OCR toolkit in the world, supporting Latin, Cyrillic and Asian recognition applications, and is used in nearly all of the leading commercial applications that support imaging and OCR, including Autodesk Raster Design, Canon imageWARE, CardScan (formerly Corex Technologies), FileNET Panagon Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture, Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft SharePoint.

“The expanding use of ScanSoft toolkits within new developer communities is being driven in large part by the fact that imaging, scanning and PDF have become mainstream technologies," said Robert Weideman, senior vice president, ScanSoft Productivity Applications. "The continued proliferation of PDF, network scanning devices and content management systems will accelerate this trend, particularly as more organizations recognize the flexibility and cost savings that they can achieve with our products.”

ScanSoft will be in Booth #743 at the AIIM OnDemand Conference and Exposition, taking place in Philadelpia May 17-19, 2005.

Availability

The ScanSoft OmniPage Capture SDK is available directly from ScanSoft, with pricing that starts at $4,495. For more information please visit www.scansoft.com/omnipage/capturesdk/ or call ScanSoft at (1) 800.443.7077.

About ScanSoft, Inc.

ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) is the global leader of speech and imaging 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, OmniPage, and the ScanSoft logo, are registered trademarks or trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other company or product names mentioned 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.