Opera Software, best known for its Web browser, is venturing into the living room. Opera's voice-enabled Electronic Program Guide (EPG), featuring IBM Embedded ViaVoice, fuses together the tasks of many different remote controls into basic voice commands.

With EPG, users tell their DVD player or cable box what they want to happen by talking to it. The announcement comes just weeks before Opera is expected to make available a voice-enabled version of its Web browser.

According to Opera, the voice-enabled EPG is a multimodal project that is intended to raise awareness of the benefits that arise from the coalescence of speech technologies with consumer electronics.

"The integration of voice with data is a natural evolution, and has enormous potential in the integrated home media market. Through our efforts with IBM, we hope to enable operators and OEMs to quickly get their HTML and JavaScript-based applications talking." says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.

Opera has written the software in +Voice or X+V multimodal programming language and its initial focus is on enterprise customers and developers. The release is only available as an English language SKU.

More information about X+V multimodal speech applications is available on IBM's PVC Web site.