Microsoft Agent ActiveX Control in VB

A Cool Intro


- R.Purushothaman



This article touches Microsoft Agent ActiveX control up to the basic.
This article is written assuming that the reader is familiar with Visual Basic 6
programming.

U bored of simple Visual Basic Forms? If the answer is yes, then you
are the right person to eat this. You might have seen many characters
in your life. Now let me show my hands to some characters in your
desktop. Thanks to Microsoft Agent ActiveX control and API (Application
Programming Interface), we can make animated characters work for you. You
can program a Genie or a Parrot or a Virgin Girl to wish for you when you
start your application and respond to your voice commands.

Microsoft Agents services are easy to access from the programming
languages that support the ActiveX control interface, and Microsoft visual
basic is one of such programming language.

What is Microsoft Agent Control?
Microsoft Agent is a set of programmable software services that
supports the presentation of interactive animated characters within the
Microsoft Windows interface. Developers can use characters as interactive
assistants to introduce, guide, entertain, or otherwise enhance their Web
pages or applications in addition to the conventional use of windows, menus,
and controls. It is implemented as an OLE Automation (Component Object
Model, COM) server.
Microsoft agent is an ActiveX control which can be used to display and
animate some Characters. Those characters can be animated and can
respond to your voice and mouse commands.
The animation and the movement of the characters image are
controlled by the Microsoft Agents Animation service. Basically, an animation
is nothing but the sequence of frames that are timed for their display.

System Requirements
To work with Microsoft Agent ActiveX technology, you need some
of the following components along with Windows Operating System.
1. Ms -Agent core components
2. Lernout & Hauspie Truvoice Text To Speech Engine
3. Microsoft command and control speech engine.
R
These are the integral components of Microsoft Agent SDK (Software
Development kit) which comes with Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0. Its available
in all Microsoft Windows version. If you dont have them, download from
Internet.
The SDK comes with 3 characters (Merlin, Genie and Robby). There are
myriad of other characters available on Internet. They are available at
www.microsoft.com/msagent. Search your computer for .ACS File.

More tools
Along with the agent core components, developers can download the
following tools from the same above mentioned site.

MS-Agent Character Editor (ACE) helps you to create your own custom
characters to use in your applications.
Microsoft Agent Linguistic Information Sound editing tool helps to
enhance the sound capabilities of the character and to produce high
quality lip synching for the character.

Where is the Ms Agent Control?
There are some default controls present in the toolbox of the Visual
Basic 6 Environment. The Microsoft Agent control is not present in that
intrinsic control list and so the control must be added to the Visual Basic
project through the Components dialog box.
To do so,

1. First create or open a new Visual Basic Form by clicking
File New Project and select Standard EXE from the available list

2. To add the Ms Agent control to the toolbox click Project Components
(or) press CTRL + T and then select Microsoft Agent Control 2.0 from the
available list

3. Now you can see that a new control is added to the Visual
Basic Toolbox. Double click that Control icon in Toolbox to add
that control to the form.

To keep this article simple to understand lets keep aside the architectural
design of Microsoft Agent services and COM server. Now let us see the
programming face (phase).

Loading a Animated Character
Before animating a character we must load that character to our
application. To load the characters data, Load method of the Agent ActiveX
control is used. Microsoft agent control can support two types of animated
character data. They are
By HTTP service
This is the separate file format that can be accessed via HTTP server.
These files with extension .ACF & .ACA can be used in designing Microsoft
Agent enabled Interactive web pages.
By Simple File Access
This is the single structured file format (.ACS). These files are stored
locally in the disk.
Please note that, in this entire section I will use only .ACS format for
making the reader feel easy.

In the code 1 below, we have loaded the Peedy animated character which
looks like a parrot.

The first argument given
to the Load function is
the Character ID of the
character being loaded.
It uniquely identifies the
current agent character
from other loaded
characters.
The second
argument is the character data file. In this example Peedy character is used
and so the data file for Peedy character file (Peedy.acs) has been specified.
The character is loaded automatically from the C:\Windows\MsAgent\Char\
folder. If the file is present any where then specify the filename along with the
path as C:\Agent\Peedy.acs or if you want load the default character dont
include the second argument. Example:

Agent1.Characters.Load "Agent"

If you copy the code 1 in the Visual Basic application, and run it, you
may notice that an animated parrot in front of you. Before executing the
applications make sure that the path name of Peedy.acs is correctly specified.
If not, use the appropriate path name in the second argument
A Microsoft Agent control can load only one Character at a time;
however we can load multiple instances of the same or different characters
using separate Microsoft Agent Controls. In this case, to identify the desired
Agent Character, Character ID is used.

Displaying the Character
After loading the character data we must use the Show method of the
Agent control to show the loaded animated character. Note that when using
the Show method we have used the Agent controls Character ID as the
argument to the Item (Code 1).

Let them Speak & Think
The Speak method enables you to program the character to speak the
text, automatically lip-syncing the output. Specify the text to be spoken by the
character as the
argument to the
Speak method. Agent
supports textual
captioning of Speak
method using a
Code 1
Private Sub Form_Load ()
Load Animation Character
Agent1.Characters.Load "Agent", "Peedy.acs"
To Show the Agent on Screen
Agent1.Characters.Item ("Agent").Show
End Sub

Code 2
Private Sub cmdSpeak_Click ()
Agent1.Characters("Agent").Speak "Hello"
Agent1.Characters("Agent").Think "R U Mad?"
End Sub
cartoon word balloon.
According to the text, the lip movement of the character is
synchronized. Look for the Code 2.
You can also include vertical bar characters (|) in the Text parameter to
designate alternative strings, so that the Agent Control randomly chooses a
different string each time it processes the method. Look this code,
Agent1.Characters("Agent").Speak "Hello|Welcome|Warm Entry"
To generate voice output, a
compatible TTS (Text To Speech) engine
must be installed. If TTS engine is not
installed in your system, no voice is heard
and only the text is displayed.

You might have noticed the method
Think in the Code 2. The Think method is
used to display the specified text for the
specified character in a "thought" word
balloon. See the thinking R U Mad?.

Playing the Animation
When the character frame is loaded we can animate the character by
using the Play method of the Agent control. You can use the Play method,
specifying the name of an animation, to play that animation. Please note that
animation names are specific to a character definition.

Agent1.Characters ("Agent").Play "Search"

This line of code makes the agent character to play the search animation in
the desktop. To get a list of all animation names supported by the character
AnimationNames property is used. Its an array of all animation names.
Just look and observe the Code 3.
This Visual Basic codes loads the Merlin character and then show it on the
window for you. Moreover, it populates the combo box (Combo1) with the
animation names
that are available
with the Merlin
character and
then plays the
Search
animation of the
Merlin character.
If you try to play
an animation
which is not
supported by a
character, Visual
Basic generates
Code 3
Private Sub Form_Load ()
Dim AniNames As String
Agent1.Characters.Load "Agent", "Merlin.acs"
Agent1.Characters.Item ("Agent").Show
For Each AniNames In _
Agent1.Characters("Agent").AnimationNames
Combo1.AddItem AniNames
Next
Cpmbo1.ListIndex = 0
Agent1.Characters ("Agent").Play "Search"
End Sub
an error. So be cautious that you are specifying the correct animation name
for the loaded character. Some common animations that most of the
characters can perform are Show, Hide, and Alert.

Positioning the character
When the Agent character is loaded at run time, the character is
positioned at the screens top left corner. The loaded character can be moved
within the screen using Top, Left (property) and MoveTo (method).
Top property returns or sets the top edge of the character.
Left property returns or sets the left edge of the character.
MoveTo method moves the character to the specified location.

The Top and Left properties are always expressed in pixels, relative to screen
origin. Look down for the code to reposition the character at run time.

Agent1.Characters("Merlin").Top = 40
iLeft = Agent1.Characters("Merlin").Left
Agent1.Characters("Merlin").MoveTo 150, 230

Hiding the character
To hide the loaded character, the Hide method comes to the help.
When you hide the character, the character disappears from the desktop.
When the voice recognition feature of the character is enabled, you can call
back the hidden character by just speaking the characters name in the
microphone.

Agent1.Characters ("Merlin").Hide
The above line of code hides the character with the Character ID Merlin from
the screen.

Setting Balloon styles
As I said, Speak and Think method displays the text using a cartoon
word balloon. A character's initial word balloon styles are defined when they
are compiled using Microsoft Agent Character Editor. You can access the
properties for a character's word balloon through the Balloon object, which is a
child of the Character object.
The properties that can be overridden are

FontCharSet, FontName, FontSize, Style and Visible
The user cant set the values for other properties. Those read only
properties are

BackColor, BorderColor, Enabled, CharsPerLine, FontUnderline, ForeColor,
FontStrikeThru, NumberOfLines, FontBold, FontItalic.

I hoped you enjoyed this article and feel free to drop in your queries,
suggestions and criticisms to mailtopuru@yahoo.com
References:
www.microsoft.com/msagent
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