Contract Win

Eckoh Technologies PLC
13 December 2004


                                                                13 December 2004




         Eckoh Technologies and Twenty First Century Communications win
                3-year contract with Northern Ireland Electricity

Eckoh Technologies plc ("Eckoh"), one of Europe's leading speech application
service providers, and Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. (TFCC), today
announced the launch of TFCC's High Volume Call Answering (HVCA(R)) service for
Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE). This is the start of a three-year contract
to provide these services to NIE.

NIE is responsible for the regulated procurement, transmission, distribution and
supply of electricity to 750,000 homes and businesses in Northern Ireland. It is
the largest company within the Viridian Group plc.

TFCC currently serve over 70 US electric utility clients covering over 69
million customer meters in the North American marketplace.  TFCC's HVCA(R)
service is the industry-leading power cut call handling solution.  The HVCA(R)
service has been developed and refined over 15 years and has been customised and
re-deployed for the UK market supported by Eckoh who will exclusively host and
manage the call handling platform on behalf of TFCC.

The HVCA(R) service will provide NIE with the ability to automatically process
large volumes of calls resulting from power cuts. The service allows customers
to inform NIE that they are experiencing a power cut, enables the capability of
providing specific messages regarding the effected area, estimated restoration
times by area, and includes call back options to confirm power restoration, as
well as numerous other proven features. The service will utilize advanced speech
recognition technology to identify the customers by their postcode, and is being
rolled out in phases across NIE's service territory beginning in December 2004.

Michael Skelton, Emergency Response Manager at Northern Ireland Electricity,
comments:  "We are delighted to be working with market leaders like TFCC and
Eckoh in order to provide an improved customer experience. TFCC have extensive
experience in High Volume Call Answering in the North American utilities
marketplace, and Eckoh's large hosted speech UK platform gives us the confidence
that our customer's power fault calls will be handled efficiently and
professionally."

Thomas Calabro, Senior Vice President for TFCC, comments: "We commend NIE for
its leadership in being the first adopter in the UK of this best practice high
volume call handling solution for power cuts.  NIE has diligently selected the
HVCA(R) service solution that combines TFCC's market-leading proven performance
in North America with Eckoh's UK-leading capabilities for large hosted speech
platforms."

Jim Hennigan, Managing Director of Speech Solutions at Eckoh Technologies,
comments: "We were extremely pleased to partner with TFCC in the UK marketplace,
and are delighted at the partnership's success in winning this significant
contract with Northern Ireland Electricity. The ability to terminate large
volumes of calls in the event of power cuts is only feasible via a large hosted
solution like Eckoh's, and reinforces our strategy of providing hosted services
on this scale. TFCC have a proven track record in the US and we are looking
forward to replicating that success in the UK with NIE and other utility
clients."



For further enquiries, please contact

Eckoh Technologies plc                                        Tel: [phone]
Martin Turner, Chief Executive
Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer
Jim Hennigan, Managing Director, Speech Solutions

Buchanan Communications                                       Tel: [phone]
Mark Edwards/Jeremy Garcia



Notes to Editors

About Eckoh Technologies:
Eckoh Technologies plc designs, builds, hosts and manages Speech Solutions for
large corporations and organisations using ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) and
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technologies. It is a leading UK service
provider and infrastructure owner/operator, and intends to exploit the
anticipated growth in demand for Speech Solutions across Europe.

In January 2003, Eckoh signed a landmark deal to create an exclusive speech
alliance with BT to provide hosted speech recognition solutions to their
corporate client base over the next 2 years. This contract was then subsequently
extended until December 2006. In December 2003, BT and Eckoh announced
significant contracts to the value of £6m with UGC Cinemas, TD Waterhouse, RNIB
and Wire-E.

In June 2003 Eckoh enlarged its call processing infrastructure to 7,000 lines
(capable of handling 500,000 calls an hour) by installing another platform into
a BT hosting facility. This created the largest speech enabled call processing
platform in Europe.

In addition to those above, Eckoh has contracts to supply hosted Speech
Solutions to clients including ATOC, Barclays, Virgin Mobile, William Hill,
Wyevale Garden Centres and Vue.


Eckoh also operates the following businesses:


*     IVR - following the acquisition of Intelliplus Group plc in Sept
2003, Eckoh is one of the largest providers of managed IVR and SMS services in
the UK to media clients including the BBC, ITV, Trinity Mirror, Channel 4,
Endemol, Celador, EMAP and Cartoon Network.

*     Network Services - under the "Symphony" and "Freecom" brands, Eckoh
supplies fixed line and mobile telephony services, broadband and data services
to SMEs in the UK and Ireland. Following the acquisition of Intelliplus Network
Services now has an SME customer base of over 13,000.


In the year to 31 March 2004 Eckoh Technologies plc generated a turnover of
£62.5 million and had a cash balance of £10.2m.


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


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