Take into consideration that, for the application to run correctly on user's machine, the user need to install two packages, Microsoft Agent and Microsoft TTS.
If you need to create your own characters you can download the Agent Character Editor and start using character creation. In addition, you are not end up using characters created for you. It is worth mentioning that, if you need to extend speech feature of Microsoft Agent to support other languages other than English, you need to download your preferred language package from the Speech SDK page. The Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine is used to translate text into voice. These packages are available in the Speech SDK in this page. In addition, you need to download the Speech API and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine in order to enable the speech feature of Microsoft Agent. It's available for downloadalong with its documentation in the Microsoft Agent SDK download page on Microsoft. But, in order to start programming you need to download the Microsoft Agent SDK. Programming Microsoft Agent is very easy. Visit Microsoft Agent Ring for downloading plenty of characters. In addition, Office 2003 comes with many characters including Clippit. Though, Merlin is included by default in Windows. There're plenty of characters available for download. And figure 2 shows Merlin the most widely-used Microsoft Agent character in Websites and applications. Figure 1 shows the Clippit office assistant. Microsoft Agent characters can be found in various applications and Websites, including Office 2003 and its ascendants, it comes as the Office Assistant. For XAML applications, it is the same as Windows Forms, except that you will need to add Microsoft Agent Control inside a .WindowsFormsHost WPF control. For Web application, you can refer to the Microsoft Agent Platform SDK documentation.
It is a set of software services that enable developers to incorporate interactive animated characters into their applications and Web pages.
Microsoft Agent is a technology that provides a foundation for more natural ways for people to communicate with their computers. It provides powerful animation capability, interactivity, and versatility, with incredible ease of development. Microsoft Agent is an unprecedented technology to create innovative, new conversational interfaces for applications and Web pages. This article was previously published in my blog, Just Like a Magic.ĭownload the sample application, PartIt.