21st Century Extends Contract

Eckoh PLC
05 December 2007



Eckoh PLC

5th December


Twenty First Century Communications Inc extends the strategic alliance targeting
                     UK utilities with Eckoh until May 2013

Eckoh, the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, today
announced a new five year contract with strategic US partner, Twenty First
Century Communications Inc, ('TFCC'), for the delivery of automated power outage
communications solutions into the UK utilities market.

Since the strategic alliance was established in 2002, Eckoh and TFCC have
successfully secured four substantive deals amongst some of the UK's leading
utilities, accounting for over 6.5 million of the UK's 30 million electricity
meters. TFCC provide a similar service to utility companies in the US which now
covers over 70 million customer electricity meters and the expectations are that
the UK service will experience strong growth over the contract period.

TFCC and Eckoh's solution for the utilities sector is underpinned by TFCC's
industry-leading High Volume Call Answering service (HVCA(R)), which
incorporates advanced speech recognition ('ASR') technology from Eckoh. The
service has been customised and consistently refined for the UK market over the
past five years, giving customers the ability to inform their utilities provider
when they are experiencing a power outage and to receive restoration updates on
a 24/7 basis.

The solution provides callers with location specific restoration updates by
identifying their exact location from their spoken post code, address and
telephone number using Eckoh's ASR. Other proven capabilities of the solution
include an innovative call back capability, designed to confirm with customers
when power has been restored in their local area.

All calls are hosted on Eckoh's speech enabled, call processing platform, which
has the capability of handling 650,000 calls an hour and 8,000 calls
concurrently. The resilience of Eckoh's hosted platform gives utilities
organisations the confidence they need to manage high volumes of unpredictable
call peaks, during even the most severe power outage periods.

Jim Hennigan, Executive Director, Eckoh said:
'The alliance with TFCC is a key strand of Eckoh's ongoing strategy to
capitalise on growth from the speech solutions marketplace; we are delighted to
extend our contract with them and are confident that the partnership will grow
from strength to strength over the next five years as demand for speech based
self service continues to gather momentum in the utilities sector'.

Gerald Robertson, Chief Operating Officer, TFCC, added:
'Eckoh's longstanding expertise and their best of breed technology has made them
the ideal partner to work with as we look to further expand our portfolio of
communications self service solutions into the UK marketplace.'

                                      Ends

Enquiries:

Eckoh plc
Nik Philpot                         + 44 1442 458 300
Adam Moloney
Jim Hennigan

Corfin Communications
Harry Chathli, Neil Thapar          + 44 20 7977 0020

Seymour Pierce
Jonathan Wright/Parimal Kumar       + 44 20 7107 8000


About Eckoh

Eckoh is the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services. Eckoh
enables its clients to communicate more effectively and to enhance their
profitability, whilst making life better for the people who use their services.

Eckoh provides automated services in virtually every industry sector for clients
including Vue Cinemas, William Hill, O2, Ideal Shopping Direct, DEFRA, The
London Stock Exchange, National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP healthcare, BSkyB,
Parcelforce Worldwide, BAA, Barclays Stockbrokers, TD Waterhouse, United
Utilities, Scottish Power and NIE (Northern Ireland Electricity).

Eckoh is also a market leader in providing interactive services to large media
owners and has amongst its clients ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster,
Trinity Mirror, the largest newspaper publisher and IPC, the leading consumer
magazines group.

In 2003, Eckoh formed a strategic alliance with BT to capitalise on the growing
opportunity for speech recognition services in the corporate marketplace. The
alliance, which was extended in July 2005 until 2010, has supplied speech
services to over 25 clients generating more than 55 million minutes of speech
self-service transactions. The combined strengths of both parties have created
an unrivalled and value-added speech proposition and clients of the alliance
include: National Rail Enquiries, AXA PPP healthcare, Parcelforce Worldwide,
Barclays Stockbrokers, TD Waterhouse, NIE, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Three
Valleys Water.

Eckoh has a call processing platform of 10,000 lines (capable of handling over
650,000 calls an hour) of which over 8,000 lines incorporate speech recognition
technology making it one of the largest speech enabled call processing platforms
in Europe.

Further information can be found at www.eckoh.com.




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