"We're merging voice and browsing," Christen Krogh, Vice President Engineering at Opera, told Reuters during a visit to the company's Oslo headquarters.
The voice-enabled Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for home media is a tool based on Web-browsing technology for navigating TV channels and programme information, without juggling an array of remote controls, Opera said in a statement. Opera's EPG uses IBM's Embedded ViaVoice speech technology to recognise commands such as "record Frasier" or "browser go back" spoken into a microphone connected to a digital video recorder or set-top box.
"We are excited to continue our relationship with Opera to help set the standards for a voice-enabled Web," Igor Jablokov, Director for Multimodal and Voice Portals at IBM Software Group, said in a statement.
Digital TV operators and manufacturers of DVD players, digital video recorders and set-top boxes could use Opera Software's development kit to get their applications talking, Opera said. Opera, a tiny rival to Microsoft in the computer browser market, said it was weeks away from rolling out a new voice-enabled edition of the Opera browser for PCs.