Spyglass and Lucent Technologies Team up to Demonstrate Voice-controlled Web Browsing

Collaboration Enables Internet Navigation from Any Telephone, Greatly Expanding the Reach of On-line Services

LAS VEGAS - Monday, October 12, 1998 - The feasibility of voice activated Web browsing is being demonstrated at this year's Wireless IT Conference by Internet pioneer Spyglass Inc. (NASDAQ: SPYG) in collaboration with Lucent Technologies.

A concept prototype service being shown enables users to dial a single number and then, through simple voice commands, to navigate through standard Web pages to obtain voice-synthesized sports scores, weather information and stock updates.

The technology could be ideally suited for on-line service providers looking to broaden their customer base by providing telephone-only access to the Internet. For the purpose of the demonstration, the services have been limited to sports, stocks and weather. In commercial implementation, a service provider could use virtually any Web site and deliver any number of services.

The phone browser is made possible by coupling telephony, speech recognition and text-to-speech technology, developed by Lucent's Bell Laboratories, with Spyglass Prism, a server-based content delivery application platform that visits Web sites and selectively extracts and packages content into a format best suited for telephones. For example, most Web pages contain far more information than a simple weather forecast. Headlines, related links, advertisements, and the like may add value when a page is viewed on a PC, but it is too much information to deliver via a telephone. Spyglass Prism will extract only the weather forecast and then deliver that to the Lucent platform for conversion to voice. A schematic of the Lucent/Spyglass phone browser is available at http://www.spyglass.com/images/pepdiagram.gif

According to Spyglass General Manager Randy Littleson, Lucent deserves the lion's share of credit for developing the phone browser architecture.

"We had been experimenting with a voice-based user interface for Spyglass Prism for some time," said Littleson. "But it was only after joining Lucent's Cooperative InnovationsSM program that we had access to the cutting edge telephony, voice recognition and text-to-speech technology that had been developed by the Bell Labs group. In one of our earliest meetings, it became apparent that we could meld our mutual technologies into something potentially much more valuable to the marketplace."

About Spyglass Prism
Spyglass Prism is an Internet content delivery system that significantly improves the performance of any wireless device that accesses the Internet. Spyglass Prism is standards-based, server technology that dynamically optimizes and selectively extracts Internet content originally authored for display on personal computers to fit the unique characteristics of multiple mobile devices. By optimizing the content, Spyglass Prism reduces the amount of data that has to be transmitted over limited wireless bandwidths. The result is that content is displayed on smart phones, as well as palm size, handheld, and laptop computers, from two to more than twenty times faster than a device that does not use Spyglass Prism. No additional software or hardware is required on the client device. Regardless of the specific conversion, these technologies make wireless content transmissions faster and more reliable.

About Lucent Technologies
Lucent Technologies supplies mobile and fixed wireless communications systems that offer global service providers standards-based solutions for serving the information needs of consumers and enterprises. Headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States, Lucent designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's Web site at http://www.lucent.com.

About Spyglass
Spyglass (NASDAQ: SPYG) provides Internet expertise, software and services for making devices work with the Web. Particularly active in the cable and satellite television, wireless telecommunications, consumer electronics and office equipment markets, Spyglass solutions are used by market-leading companies including GTE, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA) and Xerox. Spyglass headquarters are located at 1240 East Diehl Rd., Naperville, Ill., 60563; phone: 630.245.6512; fax: 630.245.6693; press email inquiries: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.spyglass.com.

-30-