Talk:Microsoft Agent

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Some of the stuff on this page seems like it would be better suited on the Office Assistant article. Andrevan 00:31, 2004 June 30 (UTC)

The author of this page does not understand the Lumiere project of Microsoft Research which was quite different than the Office Assistant developed by a Microsoft product team. The research project was concerned about appropriate interruption from the very beginning and did not focus on character-based agents, but on providing the right assistance. Interested readers should see: http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/lumiere.htm

OK, Clippy is now more carefully set apart from Lumiere AlainV 08:01, 2004 Apr 6 (UTC)

My Discovery

Hello, I am a big fan of Microsoft Agents and I was turning all Office Assistants and Search Assistants into Agents like Merlin when I discovered an unknown agent character file in my computer, I copied it I pasted in Chars, so I can see it now on MASH. It is the question mark of Help and the name of its file is qmark. It is in System32/Oobe/Images. It has movement and actions like the other agents. If you search for all Microsoft Agent Character Files, you will find it (Windows XP)I am logged out know, but my account is Jomiarias, if you have something to tell me about this, write to jomiarias@yahoo.es. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.28.90.161 (talk) 15:30, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I remember first seeing Agent at Comdex 1998 in Chicago (or maybe it was 99). I spent a lot of time programming and working with it. Ultimately I think it failed because it was very complicated to program and it required people to install it on their machines in order for it to work in Officer files. Eric Cable  !  Talk  14:39, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

peedy 2600:8802:D10:5E00:1E8:16CF:82E0:59C6 (talk) 01:37, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

bad link?

one of the links at the bottom of the page, "The Agnetry", leads to a under construction site. Please either fix the link, or remove it. The pointer outer 22:15, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

A rejected link

I understand that links should not be added to promote a product. Clearly it could be argued that the link to "Planetvixen third party A.I program" has no place on Wikipedia since it serves no purpose except to promote a product. On the other hand the link to "Sunfire's Microsoft Agent Pages" is clearly a personal site (which seems to serve no purpose other than to promote a product) This argument doesn't even take into consideration the image of the Cynthia 3.0 A.I. Bot (which seems to have little or no relationship to Agent technology).

Our site at http://www.pippin.us has a UNIQUE, fully functional script unlike any other on the Internet which can also be FREELY copy and pasted to other websites. All things considered, I would sumerize the content on our site to be just as useful and any other for those that wish to learn more about the Microsoft Agent technology. We teach by example. Based on your explanation to why our site isn't included leads me to think that none of the websites you currently list should be included.

Ananova is a Web-oriented news service that originally featured a computer-simulated animation of a woman newscaster, named "Ananova," who had been programmed to "read" newscasts to Web users. The full page article at wikipedia reads that the animated Ananova character has been unavailable since sometime in 2004. Our website does it equally as well and our Microsoft Agent character is still reading newscast to web surfers freely after all these years. Does this mean the individual who thinks a simple link on the Microsoft agent page to our website is not appropriate is in process of writing up an entire page devoted to our little newscaster at http://www.pippin.us? - BruceCPippin 03:13, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

"License" paragraph removed

I removed this paragraph, since it made no sense, and the link it referred to (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061030&s=risen103106), is dead.It read:

Microsoft Agent's restrictive license has been criticized. It forbids, most notably, users of this program to publish anything that might say. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Asav (talk • contribs) 05:43, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

File:Microsoft Agent test page.png Nominated for speedy Deletion

An image used in this article, File:Microsoft Agent test page.png, has been nominated for speedy deletion for the following reason: Wikipedia files with no non-free use rationale as of 3 December 2011 What should I do? Don't panic; you should have time to contest the deletion (although please review deletion guidelines before doing so). The best way to contest this form of deletion is by posting on the image talk page. If the image is non-free then you may need to provide a fair use rationale If the image isn't freely licensed and there is no fair use rationale, then it cannot be uploaded or used. If the image has already been deleted you may want to try Deletion Review This notification is provided by a Bot --CommonsNotificationBot (talk) 12:43, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Re: removed external links

All of the external links recently removed have been in the article for several years, so why were they only just now remove? Comments to my private Talk page suggested I contributed all of the links, but I didn't. Only one of the external links was mine (the ACS/ACF/ACA spec), the rest of the links were contributed by other MSAgent users over the years. So why weren't their links removed at the time they were first contributed? Makes me think no other editors considered them in violation at the time.

In any case, I can understand wanting to remove links that promote 3rd party products. But at the very least, I think the link to DoubleAgent should be restored. Users reading this article about MSAgent and its history and discontinuation by Microsoft should be allowed to know that a replacement product exists which carries on MSAgent's legacy. Perhaps the same with the recent link for the repackaged MSAgent installer for Windows 8, too. These are relevant to MSAgent's history and continued use by end users.

I'd like to have the link to my technical spec restored too, since it is directly related to MSAgent'S technology. But if you feel it is not relevant to Wikipedia, so be it.

Rlebeau47 (talk) 01:04, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi Rlebeau47, just because content has been part of an article for some time doesn't mean that it was right to be there in the first place. Wikipedia is a place run by volunteers and therefore not all edits can or will be checked at the time they are made.

I don't see any content in the article (supported with reliable sources of course) that says something about Double Agent being the successor product, so there's no reason to include a link to their site. – NJD-DE (talk) 01:23, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia censors information, even if relevant information, and is therefore biased! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.211.79.94 (talk) 08:41, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

External links section bad link...

Hi!

This is to let you know that the link in the External links section is no good. It leads to nowhere.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.50.216.103 (talk) 11:31, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Maybe this depends on region or OS language settings, but I am able to access the link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/lwef/microsoft-agent that is part of the current version of the article. – NJD-DE (talk) 11:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

PS: That was why. Must be for the US.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.50.216.103 (talk) 16:46, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I've been able to access that link from a US, and non-US location. – NJD-DE (talk) 17:52, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

What did this software actually do?

The article as it presently exists doesn't actually explain what these "Agents" helped with. This seems like it should be included on the article... FPTI (talk) 14:38, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

They did very little! Agent itself was a layer within a broader stack. The Agent API had functions to display and control an animated avatar on the screen, and to have this avatar 'speak', in both on-screen text and speech. The speech features were part of a separate layer beneath this, Lernout & Hauspie tech AFAIR. This included both text to speech (pretty good for its day, when soundcards were still an optional feature on PCs) and also some speech recognition that was a bit less successful (again, this was typical for the era).

Agent did not do the interfering 'wizard' stuff that Clippy became famous for. That was a layer, like Office Assistant, that was built on top. It could be good or bad, depending on how well it behaved and how intrusive it was.

Agent was built as an ActiveX control and so could be controlled very easily by any programs built with the Microsoft technology platforms of the time: Visual Basic, Visual C++, Excel macros or web pages within Internet Explorer. This was really easy and anyone could do it; it was harder to find something useful to build from it! But it was also the easiest route to access speech synthesis on a Windows machine at the time (you could even hide the Agent and have the speech alone). I built our office timesheet system (Excel sheets) to have a pop-up Agent character as an 'Assistant' to flag some of the regular timesheet problems we used to have, about detail for travel claims.

The Agents themselves were little animated loops of about a dozen 'actions' for a character. They were very simple - stuff like appearing, standing still, walking across the screen, pointing to a location on the screen, talking, standing quietly (maybe getting bored - there was a ghost that gradually went transparent when not used) and then vanishing. Anyone with the graphic design ability to draw a simple character (2D animation) could make their own. I can't, but I still made a functional stickman character, put a clipart badger's head on it, and made it read a newspaper. The Agent API was as simple calls to 'perform a particular action', such as speaking a string of text, but it also made it easy for Assistant programmers to code their Agent to point at a location on a screen form and the Agent code could manage making the Agent walk over to it and point in approximately the right place. The Agent personalities were mostly the computer user's personal choice, so you could swap your Paperclip for a cute parrot (Peedy) that was less annoying. This had exactly the same actions as all the other Agents, but the animations, sound effects and voice timbre were different. So Merlin the Magician appeared in a puff of smoke, the parrot seemed to fly down. But Assistant programmers didn't need to know which (and mostly couldn't even tell) because the API actions were all the same.

The biggest thing I built with them was a web-hosted RSS newsfeed reader called NewsBadger, using a badger character reading a newspaper. This was Internet Explorer JScript (JScript was Microsoft's JavaScript, but could use ActiveX controls too). Most of it was server-based, for the newsfeed aggregator and preference tracking system, but the client-side code had the Badger as a newsreader and you could use the speech engine to tell it to read, skip stories, rate them as boring or interesting. It mostly sat in a screen window, reading the stories out (and scrolling up any images), so that you could do other things in the meantime.

I miss Agent. It was a simple layer and could be useful. Mostly it's blamed for the intrusive failings of Assistants that were built on top of it, not Agent's fault itself. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:34, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

"You just had to be there", brosef. This thing was a primitive chatbot for answering all your (i.e., white collar office workers') questions on how to use MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Our homeboy ClipIt was an anthropomorphic paperclip riding a wave of yellow legal pad paper to surf the help manual at your will. 2601:14D:4F00:18B0:78D0:79CB:1D2B:6117 (talk) 10:35, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

No, it wasn't a chatbot. Chatbot code was around in this era, but that would be an application running above Agent, and maybe using Agent to provide a visible or talkative interface. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:44, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

MSAgent on Windows 10(+) forum topic...

https://katiecadettech.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/getting-microsoft-agent-to-work-on-windows-10/ (+) - Sharing this (cross-platform) link for the sake of it! - https://archive.org/details/msagent-6.1_2022 - https://archive.org/details/deskbot_full_setup - Works with the msagent-6.1 MSAgent update just fine! Posting for the sake of it also. Download(s) includes extra characters. All the best! 203.211.79.94 (talk) 15:29, 15 March 2024 (UTC)