Opera Software ASA on Tuesday launched an electronic program guide that would allow consumers to give voice commands to their DVD players, set-top boxes and digital video recorders.

The new EPG makes it possible to use simple commands in interacting with the consumer electronic devices, officials with the Norwegian web browser maker said. For example, a person would say, "give me a list of today's movies," and a DVR would display on the TV screen all the movies scheduled to play on the cable network that day.

The EPG could also be customized to handle video-on-demand services, web browsing and other interactive services, Opera said.

The new product is written in XHTML+Voice, a programming language used to create multimodal web applications. Multimodal refers to having multiple interfaces for an application, such as through a keyboard, a telephone, a stylus or voice commands.

X+V, developed by Opera, Motorola Inc. and IBM, has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium, an international standards body. The technology is meant to give developers a way to combine VoiceXML-based applications and XHTML-based visual applications into a single multimodal application.

An important element missing from Opera's announcement on Tuesday was a major consumer electronics, cable, or satellite-TV company agreeing to use the EPG in its hardware, Mike Paxton, analyst for In-Stat, said. Voice-enabled consumer electronics, in general, have not taken off.

"I don't think anyone has established that there's a lot of demand for this product, yet," he said. "Some of the early platforms have come with a lot of glitches."

The technology, however, could gain traction if it's cheap, reliable and user friendly; and if software makers can partner with TV service providers, consumer electronics or PC manufacturers, Paxton said.

Beyond it's latest announcement, Opera has had only limited success in the web browser market, Paxton said.

"(Opera) has had a web browser for five years or more, but hasn't had much penetration in consumer electronics or anywhere else," he said.

Indeed, as of January, the Opera browser was used in less than 0.2 percent of computers running the Windows operating system in the U.S., the largest PC market, according to JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer was in more than 92.7 percent and Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox was in nearly 4.8 percent.

Opera also shipped an EPG software development kit that's based on the IBM WebSphere Multimodal Toolkit. Opera plans to introduce a voice-enabled version of its web browser for PCs in the first half of this year.