STYLUS INNOVATION RELEASES TELEPHONY TOOLKIT FOR TAPI

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (July 26, 1995) - Stylus Innovation, Inc. today announced
the general availability of Visual Voice for TAPI. Visual Voice for TAPI
is a new version of Stylus Innovation's award-winning Visual Voice
telephony software toolkit designed for TAPI compliant telephony devices,
including voice/fax modems, PBXs, and voice boards. Created by Microsoft
Corp. and Intel Corp., Telephony API (TAPI) defines a standard for
integrating the telephone with the personal computer under Microsoft
Windows. The general release of Visual Voice for TAPI follows an extensive
beta testing period that commenced in September 1994, making Stylus
Innovation the first software vendor to offer a Visual Basic telephony
toolkit for TAPI.

Using Visual Voice for TAPI, developers can create a variety of telephony
applications including Interactive Voice Response (e.g. Touch-Tone
banking), fax-on-demand, and voice mail. Visual Voice for TAPI is a
software component that extends the functionality of popular Windows
development environments, such as Microsoft's Visual Basic, Borland's
Delphi, and Powersoft's PowerBuilder. Applications developed with Visual
Voice for TAPI can interact with practically every available data source
and network because of the extensive third party and built-in support
available in these Windows tools.

An Expanding Windows Telephony Market

"Microsoft is delighted to see Visual Voice combined with TAPI," said
Charles Fitzgerald, Product Manager in the Telecom Products Unit at
Microsoft. "This announcement brings the power and flexibility of Visual
Voice to a broad range of telephony hardware." TAPI promises a standard
programming interface across telephony platforms allowing developers to
build hardware-independent telephony applications.

At Touch-Tone Computers (Honolulu, HI) Visual Voice for TAPI is being used
to provide cross-platform telephony solutions. According to Wayne Barry at
Touch-Tone Computers, "Visual Voice for TAPI allows us to deploy our
applications on different hardware without making changes to our code."
Wayne is deploying the same code on IBM's Windsurfer, IPC's Telemetry and
other TAPI compliant hardware.

Today, Visual Voice for TAPI will run on the Windows 3.X or Windows 95
platform. Since the TAPI interface will be included with every copy of
Windows 95, there will soon be millions of telephony capable desktops.
"Just as the inclusion of Windows printer drivers allowed any Windows
compatible application to print to any Windows compatible printer, TAPI
will allow any TAPI compatible application to work with any TAPI
compatible telephony device", said Chris Brookins Vice President of
Development at Stylus. Due to its pre-emptive multi-tasking, Windows 95 is
an outstanding platform for computer telephony applications that often
require handling multiple phone lines simultaneously.

Easy-to-Use, High-Level Telephony Development Tool

Visual Voice for TAPI is a Visual Basic custom control (VBX) that adds TAPI
support to popular Windows development tools. With Visual Voice for TAPI,
someone with no telephony experience can easily develop telephony/voice
and fax applications. Visual Voice for TAPI provides a high-level
interface to all of the following functions:

* waiting for inbound calls and detecting ringing, connection,
* line dropping, etc.
* placing outbound calls
* prompting for touch-tone input once calls are established
* playing and recording voice files
* sending and receiving faxes
* PBX call control for transfers, conferences etc.

Included in the Visual Voice for TAPI toolkit is the Voice Workbench, a
graphical tool to visually define the telephony components of an
application and generate the corresponding application logic. The Voice
Workbench is used to create and maintain voice prompts, menus, files, and
more.

Ready-to-run sample applications for voice mail, auto-attendant,
fax-on-demand, and order status systems are included with Visual Voice for
TAPI. Additionally, the product's unique TAPI Examiner feature makes it
easy for developers to test the TAPI support provided by a specific
hardware platform. The TAPI Examiner generates a complete report detailing
the compatibility between a TAPI hardware platform and a Visual Voice for
TAPI application. Stylus Innovation's Visual Voice for TAPI is available
now. Pricing starts at $495. There are no runtime fees.

Stylus' announcement coincides with the third TAPI Interoperability Event,
also knows as the TAPI Bakeoff. Stylus has attended every Bakeoff and was
the only software vendor to demonstrate a TAPI toolkit at the first
Bakeoff in August 1994. The Bakeoff provides vendors of TAPI compliant
hardware and software the opportunity to test the compatibility of their
products.

Today, Visual Voice is used by over 2500 developers world wide on tens of
thousands of successful systems. In Dataquest's 1994 IVR System Market
Share and Forecast Report, Stylus Innovation ranked second in terms of the
of the number of IVR systems shipped. Stylus' market share of 9.6% was
just behind AT&T's share of 11.3%. Visual Voice users include over 25% of
the Fortune 500.

Stylus Innovation, Inc. (Cambridge, MA) is dedicated to the development of
easy-to-use tools for Windows Telephony. Stylus has developed several
other innovative hardware and software products since it was founded in
1990. Stylus can be reached at 617-621-9545. Fax, 617-621-7862. Internet,
info@stylus.com and http://www.stylus.com.
 
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