In Windows Vista, Microsoft Agent uses Speech API (SAPI) version 5.3 as its primary text-to-speech provider. Additionally, users of Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and later or owners of Microsoft Office 2000 and later are the only ones who have Agent software pre-loaded on their computers others have to download the software and install it manually. However, web page agents are only compatible with Internet Explorer, since alternative browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox do not support ActiveX. Agents can be embedded in software with Visual Basic for Applications and in web pages with VBScript, and automated tools for the purpose of simplifying this exist. New Agent characters can also be created using Microsoft's development tools, including the Agent Character Editor.
Some characters also shipped with Microsoft Office up to version 2003 as the Office Assistants and with Windows XP as search assistants.
These are called Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby. Microsoft provides four agent characters for free, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Agent website. 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. The speech engine itself is driven by the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI), version 4 and above. Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Bob Actor characters are stored in files of the. ACF files for better World Wide Web distribution. ACS extension, and can be stored in a number of compressed. Microsoft Agent characters are stored in files of the. The current version of Microsoft Agent was quietly released on MSDN in 1997. However, Bob Actors or Office 97 assistants are incompatible with Office 2000 and later versions, and vice versa. Instead the Office team created their own characters including one dubbed "Clippit" or "Clippy". Microsoft Agent replaced the original Microsoft Bob code in Office 2000, although this use did not include Agent's much-touted speech synthesis or recognition capabilities or any of the four Microsoft Agent characters. 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 was subsequently created by Tandy Trower in an attempt to offer technology that was more flexible and available to third-party developers to include in their applications and web pages. Interactive character technology was first introduced in Microsoft Bob, 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 in Office 97.
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