IBM Japan Ltd., Oki Electric Industry Co. and Hitachi Ltd. plan to set up in April a Japanese unit of the VoiceXML Forum, an international group that promotes open standards on voice access technologies for the Internet, company officials said Wednesday.

The three firms want the Japanese unit to develop and add specifications for the Japanese language to Voice Extensible Markup Language, a computer language that enables people to access the Internet by voice commands through such equipment as mobile phones, the officials said.

The language was developed by a group of high-tech companies, including AT&T Corp. and IBM Corp., and its basic specifications were contributed last year to the World Wide Web Consortium.

However, the language is not fully capable of dealing in Japanese, the officials said.

Some Japanese companies have already begun to develop their own technologies for voice access to the Internet, but the three firms decided to cooperate in working with VoiceXML because they believe that establishing standard technologies is essential to further expand the use of the Internet, the officials said.

According to experts, with a VoiceXML system people will be able to access a special portal for spoken commands. The users can simply ask questions out loud and get answers in a synthetic voice or in visual data on a screen.

The system will be helpful, for instance, for people who are driving and need to have their hands and eyes free, experts say.