Opera Lets You Voice-Control Your Home Entertainment Setup

MEDIA CENTER PC NEWS

February 22nd 2005

Opera Lets You Voice-Control Your Home Entertainment Setup

Opera EPG

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Opera today announced their voice-enabled Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for home media, providing what they claim is an easier way for people to interact with their DVD players, DVRs and digital TV set top boxes without having to negotiate an array of remote controls.

With the Opera software, the increasingly daunting number of television channels available can be sorted and navigated without effort by talking to your set top box.

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 Web-based presentation environment is ideal for applications like EPGs, Video-on-Demand, Web browsing, and other interactive services because of its speed, standards-compliance and easy customization," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Operators can brand and specialize their offerings, and end-users can customize the appearance and functionality to their liking. The integration of voice with data is a natural evolution, and has enormous potential in the integrated home media market. Through our efforts with IBMŽ, we hope to enable operators and OEMs to quickly get their HTML and JavaScript-based applications talking."

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.

The voice-enabled EPG is written in XHTML+Voice or X+V multimodal programming language and is available in English with initial targets aimed at enterprise customers and developers. For a demonstration of X+V multimodal speech applications, visit: www.ibm.com/pvc/multimodal.

The Opera website is pretty sketchy on detail at the moment, but we look forward to getting the full run down soon. It seems likely that Opera just intend this technology to be embedded into set-top boxes and other consumer electronics devices rather than as a download to be run on a media center PC.

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