New York - September 17, 2003 - ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), a leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions, today announced that the ScanSoft® Capture Development System 12 has been selected as the winner of the first annual Transform Magazine Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Developer's Toolkit. Used to add scanning and imaging capabilities to software applications, the new release builds on its superior engine and adds support for Asian OCR (optical character recognition), enhances support for PDF (portable document format), improves accuracy by over 25 percent, and increases performance by more than 30 percent.

The Capture Development System includes everything needed to add sophisticated imaging, recognition and PDF capabilities to commercial and in-house software applications, significantly speeding time-to-market while lowering development costs. It also includes support for a wide range of input/output filters, including PDF, XML and Open eBook standards, and supports OCR (machine print), ICR (handprint), OMR (checkmark) and barcode recognition, providing multiple engines and advanced recognition-voting capabilities to deliver the most accurate results possible. The toolkit also incorporates pre-made user interfaces for controlling scanning devices, and provides tools that enable advanced image enhancement, de-skew and document processing capabilities.

ScanSoft's latest version of the world's most popular development system was selected out of a field of more than 261 software and hardware products by the readers of Transform Magazine on Wednesday, September 17 at CMP Media's TechXNY. Additional information and a complete list of winners are available at www.transformmag.com.

"Since its release, ScanSoft's Capture Development System has been our most popular and best-selling OCR software development kit to date, and this award from Transform Magazine's readers underscores our commitment and value to our customers and partners," said Robert Weideman, chief marketing officer, ScanSoft. "Transform Magazine has a long-standing reputation for its thoughtful and intelligent coverage, and we're honored to receive this distinction."

The ScanSoft Capture Development System is based on the imaging technology within ScanSoft® OmniPage Pro®, the leading application for desktop OCR and PDF conversion. ScanSoft imaging and OCR developer tools are used in nearly all commercial applications that support capture features, including Autodesk Raster Design, Canon imageWARE, Cardiff TELEform, FileNET Panagon Capture, Kofax Ascent Capture, Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft SharePoint.

About Transform Magazine

Transform (www.transformmag.com) is a print and online publication read by more than 60,000 business leaders and IT managers implementing content and collaboration products and strategies. The publication focuses exclusively on technologies for the capture, storage, management, delivery and sharing of business content. These technologies include enterprise content management; document and records management; business process management; portal-based collaboration; data and document capture software; scanners and scanning multifunction machines; forms processing and electronic forms software; enterprise report and output management; taxonomy, search and retrieval; and enabling toolkits, storage and peripherals.

About ScanSoft, Inc.

ScanSoft, Inc. is a leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions that are used to automate a wide range of manual processes-saving time, increasing worker productivity and improving customer service. For additional information on the company, please visit www.scansoft.com.

Trademark reference: ScanSoft and OmniPage Pro, are trademarks or registered trademarks of ScanSoft, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The statements in this press release that relate to future plans, events or performance are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including risks associated with market trends, competitive factors, and other risks identified in ScanSoft's SEC filings. Actual results, events and performance may differ materially. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements that speak only as of the date hereof.

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