Add Interactive Personalities to your Director, Authorware and Shockwave Applications!

XtrAgent is an Asset Xtra which enables the use of Microsoft's revolutionary "Agent" technology in Director, Authorware and Shockwave applications, that provides a foundation for more natural ways for people to communicate with their computers.

XtrAgent adds a new type of member to your cast - Agent.
Agent is an interactive animated character that can be drawn on top
of all other sprites and windows and even outside of the stage area.
It can speak, via a text-to-speech engine or recorded audio, and accept spoken voice commands.
Agents can be used as guides, coaches, entertainers, or other types of assistants or specialists.

Using XtrAgent, developers can utilize Text-To-Speech & Speech Recognition engines and freely distribute them with their applications!

In addition, XtrAgent provides powerful animation capability and interactivity, with support for high-quality lip-synching at an incredible ease of development. It comes with ready-to-use characters and also support custom characters that developers can create using the Microsoft Agent character editor.

XtrAgent is available for Windows 2000, 9X and NT. 

Auto-downloadable Director Shockwave safe version of XtrAgent is available for registered users. It is very small in size (26K), and once installed provides Shockwave applications on the Web the capability to use Microsoft Agent technology under both Netscape and Internet Explorer.

You can download a trial version 2.0 of XtrAgent,
PLAY WITH IT. ENJOY IT. DON'T USE IT FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.

If you want to develop with XtrAgent,
buy the release version!

Click here to order the XtrAgent Release version

The trial version includes the Xtra file for Director and Authorware, a sample Director movie and documentation.

In order to run the sample movie, you'll have to download and install from this page the Agent core components and Genie, Merlin and Robby character files. Text-to-speech and Speech-recognition engines are highly recommended.

System requirements:

• Microsoft Windows® 95, Windows 98, Windows NT® 4.0 (x86) or later
• Internet Explorer version 3.02 or later
• Personal computer with a Pentium 100 MHz or higher processor
• At least 16 MB of memory
• Microsoft Agent core components 2.0 or later
• Hard-disk space for core components: 1 MB
• Text-To-Speech and Speech recognition engines (recommended)
• Windows compatible sound card (recommended)
• Compatible speakers and microphone (recommended)
• Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device (recommended)
• Hard-disk space for optional components:
  Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice® Text-to-Speech engine for  speech output: 1.6 MB
  Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine for speech input: 22 MB
  Characters installed locally: 2-4 MB per character

The Agent core components:

Download and install the core components of Microsoft Agent by clicking the link below.

Download the Microsoft Agent core components (.exe file, 395K)

Language components (DLLs) add dialogs, windows, tooltips, and balloon text in an additional language to the U.S. English core components. To add a language to the core components, select it from the list below and click the download link.

Character files:

You can use the following character files with Microsoft Agent.

Text-to-speech engines:

Text-to-speech engines provide speech output capabilities for Microsoft Agent and the Agent Character Editor. In the list below, select one of the available text-to-speech engines, then click the download link. Note that you must also install the Agent language component for the specified language, except for American and British English.

When using the L&H TTS3000 engines with the Microsoft Agent characters,
you should also install the SAPI 4.0a runtime binaries since the
characters are compiled to use the L&H TruVoice engine as the default
speech output engine.


Download the Microsoft SAPI 4.0a runtime binaries

Speech recognition engines:

The Microsoft Command and Control Engine provides speech input capabilities for Microsoft Agent.

Download the Microsoft Command and Control Speech Engine, version 3 (.EXE file, 6MB)

Related Links:

XtrAgent Knowledge Object for Authorware -makes it faster, smarter and easier to develop with XtrAgent in Authorware. The Knowledge Object was developed by Bart Lewis.

La Cantoche production - specialize in the design and the creation of Microsoft Agent characters. Free Agent characters can be downloaded from their Web site.

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WebMaster: tamar@directxtras.com
Last Updated: 9/17/2003 7:43:43 AM.