Opera Software today announced the delivery of its Opera Browser 7.55 for Windows, to be used in conjunction with the IBM Multimodal Toolkit for WebSphere Studio, an Eclipse-based tool designed to help speed development of speech-enabled applications in devices such as smartphones, handhelds and automobiles.

Within the IBM Multimodal Tools, Opera Browser allows a multimodal application to display graphical Web pages while enabling speech input and output using IBM's Embedded ViaVoice engine. The toolkit enables developers to builld multimodal applications for devices from low resource PDAs to high resource in-vehicle solutions, using the industry standards-based markup language, XHTML+Voice, that combines XHTML and VoiceXML.

"The Web is being integrated into all sorts of embedded devices and machinery and the integration of voice with data is a natural evolution," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Through our efforts with IBM, we hope to enable developers to quickly get their applications talking."

Opera's own speech-enabled browser version, 7.6 for Windows, is on track to be released later this year.

Developers can download the IBM Multimodal Tools at http://www.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multimodal/

About Opera Software ASA
Opera Software ASA is an industry leader in the development of Web browser technology, targeting the desktop, smartphone, PDA, iTV and vertical markets. Partners include companies such as IBM, Nokia, Sony, Motorola, Adobe, Macromedia, Symbian, Canal+ Technologies, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp, Motorola Metroworks, MontaVista Software, BenQ, Sendo and AMD. The Opera browser has received international recognition from users, industry experts and media for being faster, smaller and more standards-compliant than other browsers.