Asunción, Paraguay / Santa Cruz, California (June 20, 2002) Sonork, SRL and Haptek, Inc. jointly announce the release of KATE - the world's first 3D animated, talking emoticon - as a FREE add-on to the Sonork instant messaging client. Emoticons have long been part of IM clients, adding diversion and emotional expressions to text-based chat. Until now, they’ve been restricted to simple 2D icons embedded into messages. With KATE, which is the first product coming from the Haptek-Sonork partnership, this is about to change. Utilizing Sonork's innovative Plugin API, KATE not only introduces a new dimension to the human exchange via instant messaging, but also opens a myriad of potential uses and applications in areas ranging from entertainment via product demonstrations to customer relationship management. KATE automatically detects a Sonork instant messaging connection, then displays a user-defined 3D character - either custom-made or selected from a range of 5 preconfigured avatars. Incoming and outgoing messages are read out-loud via a Text-to-Speech (TTS) conversion engine. In addition, common emotions (among them "rolling on the floor", "yawn", "wink" and "smile") are shown in an animated fashion. KATE can also detect the preferred language for each particular user, ensuring that dialogues in English aren't read out using a non-English TTS. Future extensions will include a real-time translation service and web-based creation and purchasing of custom characters. "With KATE we originally intended to produce a fun tool that allows Sonork users to creatively express themselves", said Haptek's Lead Engineer, Clint Brewer, "but we wanted to offer Sonork a lot more than what all the other IM clients are already providing. The end result was KATE, a unique demonstration of two outstanding technologies, but with a real and tangible application in both the consumer and business markets." "We are excited and proud at the same time", adds Miguel Balsevich, Sonork's President and Chief Technology Officer, "because KATE shows the ease with which new functionality can be added to our instant messenger using our Plug-in API. For more information on KATE, or to download a FREE demo version, visit: http://www.haptek.com/ or http://www.sonork.com/ System requirements: Windows 98SE,ME,XP,2000 DirectX 6 or better. Pentium Class 166MHz CPU 16MB RAM, 21MB disk space Sound Card A copy of the Sonork IM client Recommended: 3D Hardware Accelerated Graphics Card 32MB RAM About Sonork S.R.L ------------------ Sonork S.R.L. is a privately held company headquartered in Asunción, Paraguay. It specialises in the development of enterprise instant messaging solutions and development tools that enable the integration of IM into existing applications. The company, with a current staff complement of six, has satellite offices in Florianópolis (Brazil), Cape Town (South Africa) and Plymouth (MA, USA). Contact: Luis Guerrero, Director +595 (971) 201813 / luis@sonork.com About Haptek, Inc. ------------------ Santa Cruz (CA) based Haptek, Inc. is a software development company building the standard for truly interactive, photo-realistic, 3-D characters for the Internet. Haptek software creates photo-realistic, 3-D, full-bodied, fully animated, morphing and emotive characters in dynamic environments that visually and verbally interact with the user and with one another over the Internet, in real time and at virtually any bandwidth. Contact: Jack Wiley, Business Development [1] (831) 728-0770 / jack@haptek.com