Opera Intros Voice Controlled Program Guide
February 21, 2005 | by Ian Bell
Opera Software today announced their voice-enabled Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for home media which uses technology from IBM Embedded ViaVoice.
A differentiating benefit for consumers, the voice-enabled EPG helps make navigating complex data structures easy by using simple voice commands. For example, with the increasingly daunting number of television channels available, sorting through information and channel navigation can be done without effort by talking to your set top box. Opera is making headway into the home media market with their Web browser solutions and powerful HTML and JavaScript-based presentation engine. The voice-enabled EPG is a multimodal (or multiple forms of input and output such as speech, keyboard or handwriting) project aimed at increasing awareness in the consumer electronics sector of the benefits of voice-enabled Web technologies. "Opera is a leading player in making technology easy and accessible for people in their everyday lives, and the voice-enabled EPG is not science fiction, but a compelling demonstration of what you can do with Web technologies for home media," says Igor Jablokov, Director, Multimodal and Voice Portals, IBM Software Group. "We are excited to continue our relationship with Opera to help set the standards for a voice-enabled Web." Opera's voice-enabled EPG announcement was made just weeks before Opera rolls out their new voice-enabled edition of the Opera browser for PCs.
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