June 15, 2000

Soliloquy's CEO Speaks on Future of E-commerce

Panel of 3 Includes Michael Bloomberg, Muriel Siebert & Catherine Winchester

Catherine Winchester, the CEO of Soliloquy, Inc., a New York-based e-commerce infrastructure company, spoke June 14th on the future of online shopping at the Women's National Republican Club. Speaking alongside two prominent members of the business community, Michael Bloomberg and Muriel Siebert, Catherine Winchester focused her speech on next generation user interfaces using voice and natural language understanding. These new features, which will allow online shoppers to hold intelligent two-way dialogues with web sites as if they were chatting with a real salesperson, will dramatically enhance the online shopping experience.

"E-commerce will become interactive and conversational — and the online shopping experience will improve by a quantum leap beyond today's passive, difficult and non-intuitive experience," said Catherine Winchester. "Current e-commerce is like having shops full of goods with nobody around to assist you. Our Experts address this need by holding the shopper's hand throughout the buying process, bringing online shopping up to the level of the best bricks and mortar experience — without the high cost of real people."

Soliloquy products —built upon proprietary natural language understanding (NLU) technology — are humanizing e-commerce by making the online shopping experience conversational. Soliloquy's products allow shoppers to hold intelligent two-way dialogues with websites by typing or speaking using their own words. Communicating with Soliloquy's Experts feels like chatting with a real person — except that the Experts have a total knowledge of all products and are available 24/7 at a fraction of the cost.

About Soliloquy

Founded by serial entrepreneur Catherine Winchester in New York in mid-1997, Soliloquy (www.soliloquy.com) is at the forefront of the next generation of web infrastructure and NLU technology. The company's product lineup includes Notebook Expert™, Desktop Expert™, Printer Expert™, Car Expert™, MutualFund Expert™, and House Expert™. Customers and partners include Hewlett-Packard, Acer, HardwareStreet, CNET Data Services and Net Perceptions. Soliloquy launched Version 2.0 of its core technology in May 2000. The software first went live on Acer's web site in February 2000 (www.shopAcer.com). Soliloquy's team of over 60 technology luminaries, and more than a dozen Ph.D.s from MIT, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley is led by Dr. Mark Lucente.