Using Microsoft Agent ActiveX with LabVIEW

Thursday, December 25, 2003

Do you know that you can add Microsoft Agent Characters over ActiveX into your LabVIEW application? These MS Agent ActiveX objects give you the possibility to have live cartoon-like characters on the screen, speaking through the Lernout and Hauspie speech engine to the operator using simple text-string inputs from within LabVIEW.

At the first you must download some files from Microsoft:

1. Download the Microsoft Agent core components (MSAgent.exe, 395 KB).

2. Download the Microsoft Agent character files:
a) Genie.exe (1.6 MB exe)
b) Merlin.exe (1.8 MB exe)
c) Robby.exe (2.2 MB exe)
d) Peedy.exe (3.3 MB exe)


3. Download the Lernout & Hauspie text-to-speech engine: American English (1 MB exe)

In additional, you can found text-to-speech engines for different languages and documentation here:

Microsoft Agent download page for end-users
Microsoft Agent download page for developers

Now you can load and show characters over ActiveX, for example:

Once a character is loaded, you can use several of Microsoft Agent's methods for animating the character. The first one you use is typically the Show method. Show makes the character's frame visible and plays the animation assigned to the character's Showing state.The Speak method enables you to program the character to speak and so on... Refer to MSAgent Help for details.

Download MSAgent Sample (LabVIEW 7.0)

Some other resources may be helpful:

MSAgent.zip from info-labview.org

Additional characters:

http://www.cbuenger.de/myfriend/characters.php4
http://www.msagentring.org/chars.htm

Update 16-JAN-08:

Here the discussion why you can't get speech output with MS Agent.

It may happened because you should select proper TTS ID by the following property:

Updated vi uploaded here (LabVIEW 8.5).