In a move officials said will accelerate and expand the reach of the Internet by "voice enabling" Web content and services, the World Wide Web Consortium accepted version 1.0 of the Voice Extensible Markup Language specification.

Forum officials said among its benefits, the new standard - based on years of research and development by AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola - will simplify the creation of personalized interactive voice-response services on the Web, and lead to the production of new voice-access devices.

More details are available at www.zdnn.com.