New Contract Win

Eckoh Technologies PLC 28 January 2004 28 January 2004 Eckoh Technologies appointed as interactive telephony partner for ITV Eckoh Technologies plc ("Eckoh"), one of Europe's largest speech application service providers, today announced it has been appointed by the UK's biggest commercial television network ITV (formerly Granada and Carlton), to provide interactive telephony services to the channel. The contract, which commences on March 1st 2004, was won after a competitive pitch process, and is anticipated to generate considerable revenues for both organisations as the interactive telephony formats for broadcast programmes continue to grow and develop. The agreement covers existing shows which use telephony such as This Morning, CITV, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Trisha and The Vault, as well as new formats that are yet to be broadcast. Today's announcement will allow ITV to gain access to Eckoh's sophisticated call processing platform which with over 7,000 ports is the largest of its kind in the UK. The platform supports the traditional telephony broadcast services such as votes, competitions, polls and audience data capture, but also provides new technologies such as speech recognition which gives ITV the opportunity to enhance new programming concepts still in development. Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer for Eckoh Technologies, says: "This deal further consolidates our position as one of the largest providers of managed interactive telephone services in the UK and having worked well with Granada in the past we are very much looking forward to a similarly productive relationship with ITV. We have a shared desire to grow telephony revenues by developing innovative, compelling formats and we are delighted to be assisting ITV harness the huge potential of interactive television." Ian McCulloch, Managing Director of Operations for ITV Broadcasting, commented: "We have appointed Eckoh as our partner in this area after a rigorous process and I believe they are best placed to help us take the telephony services business forward. I am confident that they bring us the necessary technical capability and expertise which is essential to maximising the potential opportunity and we are very excited about what we can do together" For further enquiries, please contact Eckoh Technologies plc Tel: 08701 100 700 Martin Turner, Chief Executive Officer Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer Brian McArthur Muscroft, Finance Director Buchanan Communications Tel: 020 7466 5000 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. A two-year contract with TD Waterhouse for a speech recognition share check service was announced by BT and Eckoh in October 2003. 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. Eckoh has secured contracts to supply hosted Speech Solutions to clients including Virgin Mobile, Centrica, William Hill, Wyevale Garden Centres and the RNIB. 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, Channel 4, Chrysalis, Endemol, EMAP, Johnston Press 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 2003 Eckoh Technologies plc generated a turnover of £55 million and had a cash balance of £12m. In December the company announced deals worth over £6 million covering a range of clients including the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Further information can be found at www.eckoh.com. This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange

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