Opera, IBM voice

By Holly Marie Koltz | March 26th, 2004 | Filed in Accessibility, Browsers, HTML/XHTML, Web Standards (general)

ZDNet this week, offers up news where Standards meets Accessibility and Emerging technology with “Opera’s browser finds its voice,” by Matt Loney and Paul Festa.

Opera is adding voice control to its browser, enabling users to browse the Web and fill in voice-enabled Web forms by talking to their PC. They can also have the contents of Web sites read back to them.

The Opera browser will use IBM’s Embedding ViaVoice speech technology and should be available for download in the next few months.

Igor Jablokov, director of IBM voice technology and chairman of the VoiceXML Forum stated the input and output technology will be available for the computers first, then cell phones and PDA’s in the near future.

Developers will be able to build multimodal content using the open standards of XHTML and VoiceXML:

X+V combines two markup languages, both based on XML. XHTML is a version of the Hypertext Markup Language expressed in XML, and VoiceXML is an XML framework for developers of voice applications.

Other possibilites with this voice browser technology: voice control with web based presentations, and who knows, can Voice to text notes or Voice to email be too far off in the future? Digital dictations?