Microsoft Agent 2.0

Microsoft Agent 2.0

Microsoft Agent 2.0 is a Microsoft technology for adding interactive animated characters to Windows applications and web pages. It is a set of software services that lets developers place characters such as Merlin, Genie, Peedy and Robby on the screen, make them move, gesture and speak, and let them respond to mouse clicks and spoken voice commands.

Version 2.0 was released in 1998 and was included in Windows from Windows 2000 through Windows Vista. Microsoft stopped development and support with the release of Windows 7; a separate package with the core components and the Merlin character was offered for Windows 7, and the technology is not supported in Windows 8 and later.

Microsoft Agent 2.0 allows developers to give applications and web pages a talking, animated character that guides and informs users.

Features:

• Animated characters - Microsoft Agent displays characters in their own windows on top of other applications. The standard characters are Merlin, Genie, Peedy and Robby, and many third-party characters were created in the Agent character format.

• Text-to-speech output - characters can speak text through a compatible text-to-speech engine, such as the Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice engine, or play recorded audio, with the words shown in a word balloon.

• Speech recognition - with a speech recognition engine installed, users can give spoken voice commands that the character and the host application respond to.

• Animation control - developers call the built-in animations of a character, such as greeting, pointing, thinking or reading, and move it around the screen.

• ActiveX control and COM interfaces - Microsoft Agent can be used from any language or environment that supports COM or ActiveX controls, including Visual C++ and Visual Basic.

• Scripting on web pages - characters can be controlled from VBScript or JScript in Internet Explorer and from Windows Script Host scripts.

• Office integration - Visual Basic for Applications in Microsoft Office can drive Agent characters from documents and macros.

• Character Editor - the Microsoft Agent Character Editor lets developers build their own characters from bitmap frames and define their animations.

• Typical roles - characters can act as a welcome host, a tutor that leads users through a task step by step, a messenger that announces new e-mail, or an assistant that reads information aloud.

Microsoft Agent 2.0 is a legacy technology that is useful mainly for running older programs, scripts and web pages that rely on it. Developers of new applications should use current speech and user interface technologies instead, because Agent is deprecated and missing from current versions of Windows.