A budding standard, the brainchild of tech giants AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola, is fueling new software that allows people to use voice commands via their phones--either cell or land-based--to browse the Web. Users of the technology can check e-mail, make reservations and perform other tasks simply by speaking commands.

The technology, called VoiceXML, is now winding its way through the World Wide Web Consortium Internet standards body, which is reviewing the specification and could make it a formal standard by year´s end.

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