Foothill Ranch, Calif., April 2, 2008 – Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) today announced that the City of Phoenix, one of America's largest and most well-respected cities, has selected AVST as its vendor of choice for deployment of its next-generation Unified Communications solution.  AVST was introduced to the City by Black Box Corporation (NASDAQ: BBOX), a trusted service provider and leading AVST reseller.  AVST’s flagship Unified Communications solution, CallXpress, has been chosen to replace the City's end-of-life Octel^® voice mail system to support more than 14,000 employees across 40 City departments and functions. The City has implemented aggressive growth plans to expand the service to meet its needs.

Supporting mission critical, citywide communications for departments that include the Police Department, City Hall, the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and the Parks and Recreation Department, CallXpress was selected due to its ability to support very high call volumes – as high as 300,000 in a given month and in some cases, like the Family Services Center, as many as 20,000 calls in an hour.  The City of Phoenix required the ability to create more than 800 auto attendants to route calls from department to department and the system had to easily integrate with their existing Ericsson PBX infrastructure.

Ranked as one of the fastest-growing cities, Phoenix is currently the fifth largest city in the nation with over 1.5 million residents and is the largest capital city in the United States by population.  Realizing that its existing voice mail system was rapidly reaching end of life, the city began to consider its options.

“We realized early on that in order to meet the needs of our 14,000 users today, we needed to be able to deploy a robust, highly scalable and cost-effective solution in a short period of time and with minimal disruption to our current users who are scattered across more than 40 city departments and functions," said Linda Henderson, IT Supervisor for the City of Phoenix.

As the world leader in telephone user interface (TUI) emulations, AVST solves this problem for any business replacing a legacy voice mail system.  Because CallXpress can emulate the TUIs of all of the leading legacy voice mail systems, including Octel Aria^®, City staff required minimal training to make use of the new system.  Therefore, the transition to CallXpress for the City of Phoenix was relatively transparent.

Black Box Network Services understood the complex infrastructure of the City and recommended CallXpress to integrate seamlessly into their environment.  They continue to provide first class technical support to the City of Phoenix with a dedicated onsite staff of six employees.

"The biggest challenges the City of Phoenix faced in the selection and implementation of a new Unified Communications solution was the associated costs and support for a large user community," noted Crosby Smith, Vice President, West Region, for Black Box Network Services.  "The City’s legacy voice mail system had a per user license fee that quickly added up to tens of thousands of dollars each year. CallXpress allows for unlimited voice mailboxes, therefore, the cost of ownership is greatly reduced," he added.

“The City of Phoenix deployment is the perfect example of how easily CallXpress can scale to meet the needs of a large user base with very high call volumes” said Denny Michael, AVST’s Vice President of Marketing.  “CallXpress is a premier Unified Communications solution that is highly reliable and easy to implement and manage.  "With over 25 years in the industry, we have a long history in helping a wide range of organizations migrate from first generation voice mail systems to next generation Unified Communications solutions in a painless way that saves them time, money and resources," he added.

A best-of-breed Unified Communications solution, CallXpress delivers world-class call processing, voice mail, unified messaging, fax, notification and speech-enabled personal assistant capabilities to help organizations become more productive.  It increases employee productivity, effectiveness and collaboration at a minimal investment.  With all messages arriving in a single inbox, CallXpress greatly improves message management time.  Its extensive voice mail functionality ensures that all employees receive their messages efficiently and have the ability to answer queries promptly.

About the City of Phoenix
Arizona's capital city covers more than 517 square miles and is currently the fifth-largest city in the nation with over 1.5 million residents, making it the largest capital city by population.  It is the state's largest employer and ranked as one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., recognized for an overall positive economic climate and for its skilled and diverse labor force.  The City of Phoenix has been honored with numerous awards for efficient government operations and customer service.

About Black Box
Headquartered in Lawrence, PA, Black Box is the world's largest technical services company dedicated to designing, building and maintaining today’s complicated data and voice infrastructure systems. Black Box services 175,000 clients in 141 countries with 187 offices throughout the world. To learn more, visit the Black Box website at: www.blackbox.com.

Black Box^® is a registered trademark of BB Technologies, Inc.  Any third-party trademarks appearing in this press release are acknowledged to be the property of their respective owners.

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.