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Promptu Systems Corporation today announced that it is preparing for commercial rollout of its TAXINOW fully-automated taxi dispatch service in Rome and four other large Italian cities next month.

Promptu, based in Menlo Park, California, creates multimodal talk-and-type mobile phone applications for consumers, carriers, handset providers, and travel and transportation companies.

TAXINOW is a free, simple to use mobile phone application that allows users to request a taxi from their mobile phone with voice commands and receive confirmation within the application. The application is fully automated, and ends waiting-on-hold for dispatch operators, responding within seconds to dispatch requests.

"The website and application are fully functional, and our initial invitation-only deployment in Padua was a complete success. All we have to do is finish optimizing our local street and address databases, and we'll be ready to roll in Rome and other large Italian cities," said Giuseppe Staffaroni, Promptu CEO.

Three major U.S. cities are scheduled for TAXINOW deployments during the 2nd quarter, and full nationwide deployment to follow shortly after that he said.

"TAXINOW is all about three things: convenience, loyalty, and cost savings," said Staffaroni. "The deployment in Italy has shown our application has real, tangible benefits on all three fronts, for both taxi fleet operators and consumers."

To use TAXINOW service, users must first download the free application to their mobile phone.

When a taxi is needed, the user simply says the address where they would like to be picked up. The system then automatically queries the local taxi companies' dispatch system to find the first available taxi nearest the user.

"Calling a taxi can involve long waits for a call-center operator—when all you need and want is a taxi, now," said Staffaroni. "The beauty of TAXINOW is that it is directly connected to fleet operators' automatic dispatch systems. This makes calling a taxi much faster and more convenient for the end-user, and more cost efficient for the fleet operator."

Promptu will be demonstrating TAXINOW and other new multimodal mobile phone applications in Hall 2, booth number 2EZ1 at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—February 16th through 19th.

Promptu Systems Corporation is at the tipping point of a mobile revolution fueled by Voice User Interface (VUI) applications — the most intuitive and natural way to interact with a phone. Created for consumers, carriers, and handset providers, Promptu applications run on the company's fully automated Network Speech Recognition (NSR™) platform to ensure accuracy, speed, privacy, and scalability. Promptu applications can be optimized for regional accents, and support real-time review and editing of transcribed text. Every day thousands of Promptu applications are downloaded worldwide. See how the revolution is being vocalized at: http://www.promptu.com.