Pandora bot

[jitterjames]

nice. 

[Cygnus69]

Kalle, That is a cool trick. That means that Vox would be seamless with any other AI or you could create your own depending on how in depth you want to go with it.
James, Knowing you can make your own pandorabot to use is awesome. I plan on incorperating both of these into my system and i thank you.
My next topic is giving my PC a face or character. Have you gentleman seen Verbotwww.verbots.com? Gulie 3Dwww.guile3d.com? Ultra Halhttp://www.zabaware.com/home.html? Site palhttp://www.sitepal.com/? even the discontinued MS Agent Characters work for me. I have a trial of Ultra Hal on my HTPC. I am not commited to buying this program because the character is surrounded by a big blue box, you minimize and the character goes away and I do not know about modding its commands. mIRC chat has a free floating character that stays even if minimized. So imagine a character of your choice hanging out on your screen talking to you. They even have text bubbles that could be used for the OSD out put. I know this is possible but not an easy task. This post should be in feature request as well. I am requesting an Avatar or Avatar interface for Vox Commando. Mind you I am not looking for an AI program or interface with any of the above programs vice MS agent since it is a core. incorperation of a charecter engine would add to the experience of Vox Commando. The best places to start are Zabaware open source 3d character engine. MS Agent and Verbot. This is just a thought. I was disappointed when I searched the forum and thought this idea was already brought up if it has i am sorry for the spiel. If i read correct the forum was about forum Avatars and the movie? Let me know what you think James.

[jitterjames]

Can you please explain a little bit how you currently use MS Agent?

[Cygnus69]

Well James I do not use MS Agent so much. It is required as a core component for charecters. It is an addition to TTS and speech recognition. I use mIRC chat at work quit often. The Character is scripted into the program to gesture and move its mouth when someone chats to you. It is just the character floating. It will provide text bubbles with the chat that has been spoken. I have seen it scripted with VBScript I think. My ideal use for MS Agent is for it to speak what Vox commando says. Gestures are a bonus but included in any character design. MS Agent I think only uses SAPI 4 which might be a problem.

As an after thought if you could incorperate gestures into the command tree  a user could then manipulate how there chararter acts based on the command. I wish i could help. hope this is not too difficult or too much to ask. If it does work out I am sure it will pay off for you and all vox users

[jitterjames]

Hi Cygnus69

I just wanted to let you know that I am working on a plugin system for the next major release of VoxCommando.  One of the first new plugins that will be included is one for showing and manipulating MS Agent characters.

[Cygnus69]

James, The plugins are awesome. I really like what you did with the MS agent one. I do somewhat feel kinda like a dick though. I was doing some troubleshooting to use my character with Vox and that annoying blue box showed up. (Pink for genie) After doing some reading this is the result of the MS agent hotfix for win7 not supporting full transperency. How hard do you think it would be to get Vox a DoubleAgent plugin or work Double Agent into the MS Agent plugin? I am attaching a link for double agent. http://www.cinnamonsoftware.com/double_agent.htm
Is it hard to add extra commands to the plugins. Here is a site that list all the standard commands for MS agents. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms695821(v=VS.85).aspx Now I am not asking for every command as some happen automatically. (Idle and Gestures happen as a charecter is shown and does other actions.) Just some more of them to give personallity to Vox and my PC. If there is any way in which i can help please let me know.

[jitterjames]

Hi Cygnus69.  I don't know what you mean by " that annoying blue box".

Also, can you please be specific about what commands might be missing that you would like to use?  If you can tell me what I have missed it should be pretty easy to add.

At this point, I have no idea what would be involved in adding support for double agent but it will have to wait for now since I have a lot of balls in the air and no one else has expressed any interest in this area (yet).

One thing I noticed with MSAgent that you have to be careful (in Win 7 anyway) is that you can't send it too long a string to say or it will crash...  Oh Microsoft...

[jitterjames]

It says right on that page (the link you sent me) that you can switch to using double agent without having to recode anything.  Did you try it?  It says you install double agent, set the configuration and then any program that is supposed to use MS agent will use double agent instead.  Nothing for me to do here.  right?

[Cygnus69]

Once again I made myself look like an a$$. Sorry James a simple uninstall and reinstall of double Agent with a reboot in between fixed the box issue. Lesson to be learned for any one who hopes to use an avatar with there PC do not install the MS Hotfix as it is a waste of time. Only install Double Agent. No nothing from you for Double Agent. As for commands
Announce, Confused, Congratulate ,Decline, DoMagic 1, DoMagic 2, Explain, Get Attention, Hearing/Listening, Look Down, Look Left, Look Right , Look Up, Process, Read, Sad, Search, Show, Suggest, Surprised, Think, Waves, and Write. Now this is A lot of work if you do not have the time I understand. I appreciate everything.

[jitterjames]

OH. Those are all set to go.  You just create an action

MsAgent.Play

and as the first parameter you put the name of whatever animation you want to execute.  see the attached screenshot:

[jitterjames]

Also in the next version I'll include random picking like we have in TTS.Speak you can can put multiple animations like this

GestureDown | GestureLeft | GestureUp

and it will pick one randomly to execute it.

by the way I installed MSAgent patch for windows 7 and I'm not having any problems with it.  Maybe because I'm on a 32bit system?

[Cygnus69]

I believe it is only 64bit that has the issue. Have i told you your amazing! Does your TTS sync with your Charecter that you did trials with? My has not but I am sure it is an installation error on my part. Thanks again so very much.

[jitterjames]

you mean sync the voice with the mouth when I use the   MsAgent.Speak   command?  Yes, it works pretty well.  It might vary depending on the TTS voice you are using.

[Cygnus69]

It is 1:30Am where I am at. Before i go to sleep James I was wondering if you had any ideas on changing the MSAgents voice. The goal is to get all VC TTS from her, Synced together. the Agents voice is crap. I have used a VBS script to Load, Show, load new voice then Speak. All worked well. Is it possible to make the voice in VC the voice for the agent or even have a way to set and change the voice? Any way have a good rest of your day and good night all.

[jitterjames]

I think the agent is supposed to used whatever voice you have set as the default tts voice in windows. unfortunately, it seems to only work with certain voices and I'm not sure what the criteria are.  It works with Loquendo Dave though which is a good voice if you don't mind a guy's voice.  If I try to select any other voice it seems to go to Bernard, which is a french voice.  Who knows.  It's not exactly a well supported feature, especially in Win7.