| Platform SDK: Agent |
The following information documents common questions when developing for Microsoft® Agent.
The 2.0 release of Microsoft Agent is compatible with the previous 1.52 release. However, note that Agent 2.0 installs to a different directory than Agent 1.5. If you are using the Agent Microsoft ActiveX® control and you keep both versions 1.5 and 2.0 installed, you should convert your code to use the 2.0 version to avoid any design time incompatibilities.
Yes. You can use any animation rendering package, provided that you can produce your images in a 2-bit (monochrome), 4-bit, or 8-bit color Microsoft Windows® bitmap format. Then you can use the Microsoft Agent Character Editor, available for download at this site (http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/devdownloads.htm), to assemble and compile your animations.
Microsoft Agent is currently only offered for the Windows platform.
Microsoft Agent uses SAPI 4.0 to provide speech services. Windows XP however now ships with SAPI 5.0 which does not provide backward compatibility support for its predecessor. Fortunately, SAPI 4.0 and SAPI 5.0 can co-exist together on the same Windows XP computer.
To make the speech engines work with Microsoft Agent in Windows XP, first install the SAPI 4.0 runtime binaries (available at http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/sapi/spchapi.exe), then install the particular speech engines. Note, you may need to follow these procedures even if the SAPI 4.0 runtime and SAPI 4.0 speech engines have previously been installed on a computer being upgraded to Windows XP.
Microsoft Agent includes support for English (U.S.): Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean Spanish, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and other languages for its core services.
Speech input and output engines are separate from the Microsoft Agent core services and we do not currently offer speech engine support for all the languages for which the core services are available.
Check our downloads page for the Speech Recognition (http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/downloads.htm#sr) and Text-To-Speech (http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/downloads.htm#tts) engines that are available. Additional language speech engines may be available from other vendors.
Microsoft Agent 2.0 has been designed to be a Microsoft operating system component. As a result, once it is installed it cannot be uninstalled without reinstalling the operating system.