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At AVIOS, SpeechTEK 2004, Opera Software announced yesterday the upcoming release of a multi-modal desktop browser that incorporates IBM's Embedded ViaVoice speech technology.

By leveraging IBM's voice libraries in this version of Opera, users can navigate, request information and even fill in Web forms using speech and other forms of input in the same interaction.

While traditional HTML pages continue to be the foundation of the Web, advances in the function, speed and size of both computers and mobile devices, along with today's diversity of users, has increased the demand for more flexible user interfaces. By building on this standardized foundation using XHTML+Voice (X+V), developers can add voice input and output to traditional, graphically based Web pages and achieve natural voice functionality.

Opera's presentation tool, Opera Show, can effectively enable users to replace Microsoft PowerPoint. For example, by combining Opera Show with voice, users will be able to give presentations and tell Opera via voice commands to turn to the next slide without approaching the computer and pressing the 'Page Down' keyboard key.

"This new offering can allow us to interact with the content on the Web in a more natural way, combining speech with other forms of input and output - first on PCs, and in the near future, devices such as cellphones and PDAs," said Igor Jablokov, director, embedded speech, IBM, and chairman of the VoiceXML Forum.

"Developers can also start to build multimodal content using the open standards-based X+V markup language, which unifies the visual and voice Web by using development skills a large population of programmers already have today," added Jablokov.

sounds like alot of work to do for some1 whos too lazy to type there name lmao