Net2Phone and HeyAnita to Deliver Complete Voice Solutions and Hosting Services
Net2Phone leverages capabilities of Voice over IP (VoIP) network and infrastructure to become Voice ASP provider, offering integrated solutions for speech hosting

NEWARK, NJ - January 29, 2001 --- Net2Phone Inc. (NASDAQ: NTOP) today announced that it has signed a strategic agreement and completed a minority equity investment in HeyAnita Inc., a leading voice technology company, as a key step in Net2Phone’s strategy to deliver voice and enhanced services over IP networks worldwide. Utilizing state-of-the-art speech technologies, Net2Phone merges the flexibility of IP with the convenience of the phone to offer rich enhanced services to consumers and businesses globally.

Under the agreement, Net2Phone and HeyAnita will jointly market end-to-end voice hosting solutions to enterprises, call centers, broadband service providers and its established user base. Net2Phone will provide the telephony infrastructure and hosting platform and HeyAnita will build voice applications, and provide support and professional services. HeyAnita joins SpeechWorks (NASDAQ: SPWX) as a Preferred Application Developer for Net2Phone’s Softswitch platform. The Softswitch platform enables customers to replace costly interactive voice response systems (IVRs) with efficient network based speech recognition and telephony solutions.

“Net2Phone brings tremendous value to our company and potential customers by enabling HeyAnita to focus on building world class voice technologies while utilizing Net2Phone’s global VoIP managed network as one of our preferred hosting solutions,” said Sanjeev Kuwadekar, CEO of HeyAnita.

Net2Phone’s Voice Hosting Service is designed to provide businesses with the ability to offer their clients/users access from any telephone to content, services, and information by simply using their voice. Offering a speech hosting solution via Net2Phone’s IP network and infrastructure significantly reduces prohibitive PSTN hardware requirements while enabling Net2Phone the ability to drive high margin minutes over its network. Additionally, business customers benefit from labor cost savings and reduced network transit costs previously associated with deploying voice enhanced services to their customers and/or employees.

For instance, a rental car agency deploying a voice-enabled application developed by companies such as HeyAnita could speed the reservation process for customers, offsetting significant live-agent labor costs in the process. The rental car agency could also add enhanced features, including weather, hotel and restaurant information, and the opportunity to call a local hotel or restaurant directly through voice activated dialing. A brokerage firm could voice enable its operations, allowing customers to call in their trades, check account balances, retrieve stock quotes, or transfer funds.

In addition to joint sales and marketing agreements with HeyAnita and SpeechWorks, Net2Phone can leverage its relationships with its current VoIP enterprise and broadband customers to offer enhanced services to their users. The company expects to launch its own voice portal this quarter as a showcase for potential business customers, and will market it directly to Net2Phone’s 1.8 million users.

In July of this past year, Net2Phone and SpeechWorks entered into a strategic agreement where the two companies jointly integrated SpeechWorks’ automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engines into the Net2Phone Voice over IP infrastructure.

“This is exciting and speaks to a solid triumvirate of companies that together will provide full-service end-to-end speech solutions worldwide,” said Stuart R. Patterson, CEO of SpeechWorks. “SpeechWorks’ speech recognition, text-to-speech and DialogModuleä technologies combined with HeyAnita’s application development, and Net2Phone’s voice hosting infrastructure will deliver flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient solutions to businesses throughout the world.”

“Creating additional value through Voice over IP enhanced services has always been an important element to our success, and by working closely with HeyAnita to enhance our voice hosting solution capabilities, we can provide our retail and corporate customers with sticky, valuable offerings that can save money and increase productivity,” said Howie Balter, CEO of Net2Phone. “We are in a very advantageous position, having a global network, telephony infrastructure and IP Softswitch platform all at our fingertips, leveraging existing CapEx costs necessary to deploy these services.”

Net2Phone, Inc delivers voice and enhanced services to IP networks worldwide. Net2Phone enables people to place low-cost high quality calls from their computer, telephone, or fax machine to any telephone or fax machine in the world. Net2Phone develops and markets technology and services for IP voice and e-commerce solutions for the web and other IP networks. Net2Phone's strategic investors include Softbank, America Online, GE/NBC, and Yahoo!. Additionally, AT&T has acquired a 39 percent voting stake in Net2Phone. For more information about Net2Phone's products and services, please visit www.net2phone.com.

HeyAnita, a voice technology software company, was founded on the principle that everyone should have immediate access to information, regardless of where they are and what they are doing. The company is dedicated to providing businesses with turnkey voice solutions; allowing end users to access, navigate and manage Internet data, business data and other information from any device simply by using their voice. In addition, developers can easily create and deploy speech applications through the HeyAnita FREE SPEECH PLATFORMä. Some of HeyAnita’s voice applications can be accessed on HeyAnita’s Voice Portal Showcase 1-800-44-ANITA. HeyAnita's strategic partners include SpeechWorks International, and Dialogic, an Intel company. HeyAnita Inc. is a privately held company with headquarters in Los Angeles and backed by SOFTBANK Corp. and SOFTBANK Venture Capital.

About SpeechWorks International, Inc.
Organizations worldwide rely on SpeechWorks (Nasdaq: SPWX) to delight their callers and provide them with a new level of service over the phone. Complementing the self-service model of e-business, SpeechWorks speech solutions, including the revolutionary SpeechSite (TM) product, and Speechify (TM) text-to-speech engine, let customers direct their calls, obtain information and complete transactions automatically, simply by speaking naturally over any phone, anytime. SpeechWorks customers include some of the world's most sophisticated customer service innovators such as America Online, Amtrak, Continental Airlines, and Yahoo!. To experience the power of SpeechWorks, call 888.SAY.DEMO. For additional information, call 617.428.4444 or visit http://www.speechworks.com.

* HeyAnita is a trademark and servicemark of HeyAnita Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.