Microsoft Agent Downloads

Microsoft Agents are interactive personalities which can be programmed to:

convert text to speech,
perform animations, and
interface with speech recognition programs.

From version 2.0, Trout's Internet Clock can use MS Agents to speak at scheduled times, like making announcements saying the date or time etc.

MS Agent Technology is free to download from Microsoft, and there is a large and growing number of third parties supporting it.

More Characters

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Downloads from the Microsoft Agent Site

Core Components - Required unless already installed (395 KB)
(Included with Windows Me and 2000)

Microsoft Character Files - At least one character is required
(Merlin is included with Windows Me and 2000)

Genie
The Genie
(1.6 MB)

Merlin
The Wizard
(1.8 MB)

Robby
The Robot
(2.2 MB)

Peedy
The Parrot
(3.3 MB)

Text-To-Speech Engines - convert typed text to speech.
The smallest Engine is the default L&H TruVoice American-English one (1 MB)

Some hardware vendors included L&H TruVoice with Windows Me. It is not in the update.

Windows 2000 includes Microsoft TTS (synthetic speech engine) and SAPI 4 runtime. The SAPI 4 is needed to run TTS engines other than TruVoice.

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Special Messages in Trout's Internet Clock

When setting MS Agent messages in the Event Details window of Trout's Internet Clock
The following messages have special meanings:

*TIME Substitutes the current time

*DATE Substitutes the current date

*HIDE Hide the Character after it has said the message

e.g. The time is *TIME*HIDE
Makes the character announce the current time, like "The time is 7:51 pm" and then hide

Updates - Visit the

Trout's Internet Clock Website

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Downloading Characters from Other Sites

Files
Character Files have an *.acs extension
These Character.acs files must be placed in:

C:/WINDOWS/MSagent/chars or

C:/WINNT/MSagent/chars folder
(depending on your operating system).

Some of these links are self installing *.exe files, run these to set up the character.
Others are *.zip files, these need to be unzipped.

Sites
Three well known commercial sites are: Cantoche (I particularly like the 2 James characters), E-clips and Animatronix. They have free chracters and they sell them too.

You can find a lot more sites with Agent Characters by searching internet, some of these are free, some are not.
Also the quality of the characters varies, of course.

The Microsoft Agent Ring
Is a good place to get more characters and to find out more.
It maintains a list of sites in the ring. They have a gallery of characters to download, applications, statistics and more.

<< Prev Site Prev 5 Sites		Next Site >> Next 5 Sites
[Random Site] [List All Sites] [Ring Stats]
This Microsoft Agent Ring site is owned by Bruce Levett / Chemware Ltd.

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Contact Information

*TIME	Substitutes the current time
*DATE	Substitutes the current date
*HIDE	Hide the Character after it has said the message