Microsoft Agent - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Microsoft Agent is a technology developed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

which employs animated characters, text-to-speech engine

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

s, and speech recognition

Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...

software to enhance interaction with computer users. Thus it is an example of an embodied agent. It comes preinstalled as part of Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

2000

Windows 2000

Windows 2000 is a line of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, business desktops, laptops, and servers. Windows 2000 was released to manufacturing on 15 December 1999 and launched to retail on 17 February 2000. It is the successor to Windows NT 4.0, and is the...

through Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

(it is not part of Windows 7). Microsoft Agent functionality is exposed as an ActiveX control that can be used by web pages.

The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass

Clifford Nass

Clifford Nass is a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction. He is also known for his work on individual differences associated with multitasking. Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at...

and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Version History

Interactive character technology was first introduced in Microsoft Bob

Microsoft Bob

Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which provided a new, nontechnical interface to desktop computing operations. It was one of Microsoft's more visible product failures...

, which used an early version of Agent technology internally referred to as "Microsoft Actor." It was the code used in initial version of the Office Assistant

Office Assistant

The Office Assistant was a Microsoft Office feature to assist users by way of an interactive animated character, which interfaced with the Office help content. It used technology initially from Microsoft Bob and later Microsoft Agent, offering advice based on Bayesian algorithms...

in Office 97. Microsoft Agent was subsequently created by Tandy Trower

Tandy Trower

Tandy Trower is an engineer and software developer who has had a long career in the IT industry. He has worked at Microsoft for the last 28 years where he has been involved with over two dozen products, many of them well known in the market...

in an attempt to offer technology that was more flexible and available to third-party developers to include in their applications and web pages. The software release also included four interactive characters as well as a utility that enables developers to assemble their own characters and interactions.

Microsoft Agent replaced the original Microsoft Bob code in Office 2000, although this use did not include Agent's much-touted speech synthesis

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

or recognition

Speech recognition

capabilities or any of the four Microsoft Agent characters. Instead the Office team created their own characters include one dubbed "Clippit" or "Clippy". However, Bob Actors or Office 97 assistants are incompatible with Office 2000 and later versions, and vice-versa.

The current version of Microsoft Agent was quietly released on MSDN in 1998.
Microsoft recently announced that "Microsoft has decided to discontinue development of Microsoft Agent technologies. Beginning with Windows 7, Microsoft Agent will not be included or supported in future versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. We encourage Microsoft Agent application developers and redistributors to evaluate their activities in light of this decision." Microsoft is no longer offering licenses and no longer distributes the SDK.

Technology

Microsoft Agent characters are stored in files of the .ACS extension, and can be stored in a number of compressed .ACF files for better World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

distribution. Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Bob Actor characters are stored in files of the .ACT extension.

The speech engine itself is driven by the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI)

Speech Application Programming Interface

The Speech Application Programming Interface or SAPI is an API developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech recognition and speech synthesis within Windows applications. To date, a number of versions of the API have been released, which have shipped either as part of a Speech SDK, or as part...

, version 4 and above. Microsoft SAPI provides a control panel for easily installing and switching between various available Text to Speech and Speech to Text engines, as well as voice training and scoring systems to improve the quality and accuracy of both engines.

Microsoft provides four agent characters for free, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Agent website. These are called Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby. Some characters also shipped with Microsoft Office up to version 2003 as the Office Assistant

Office Assistant

s and with Windows XP

Windows XP

Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...

as search assistants. New Agent characters can also be created using Microsoft's development tools, including the Agent Character Editor. Agents can be embedded in software with Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6 and its associated integrated development environment , which are built into most Microsoft Office applications...

and in web pages with VBScript

VBScript

VBScript is an Active Scripting language developed by Microsoft that is modeled on Visual Basic. It is designed as a “lightweight” language with a fast interpreter for use in a wide variety of Microsoft environments...

, and automated tools for the purpose of simplifying this exist. However, web page agents are only compatible with Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

, since alternative browsers like Opera

Opera (web browser)

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

or Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

do not support ActiveX

ActiveX

ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....

. Additionally, users of Windows Me

Windows Me

Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me , is a graphical operating system released on September 14, 2000 by Microsoft, and was the last operating system released in the Windows 9x series. Support for Windows Me ended on July 11, 2006....

, Windows 2000

Windows 2000

, Windows XP

Windows XP

, and above or owners of Microsoft Office 2000 and up are the only ones who have Agent software pre-loaded on their computers; others have to download the software and install it manually.

Support after Windows XP

In Windows Vista

Windows Vista

, Microsoft Agent uses Speech API (SAPI) version 5.3 as its primary text-to-speech provider. (In previous versions of Windows, Agent uses SAPI version 4, which is not supported in Windows Vista and later.) Beginning with Vista, multilingual features of Microsoft Agent under a particular language version of the OS are not supported; that is, Agent will function in other languages only under a localized Windows version of the same language.

While the Microsoft Agent runtime is not pre-installed with Windows 7, it can be downloaded separately from Microsoft.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969168 The download contains the character “Merlin”, which also shipped with Windows Vista. Also, SAPI 5.3 compatible speech engines are supported with Windows 7.

Microsoft announced in April 2009 that Microsoft Agent support will be discontinued after Windows 7.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.