MS Agent character creation

[shammer]

Kudos to the folks doing all of this great work and sharing it with the community. Einstein spoke of sharing scientific knowledge with the rest of the world and felt it would help advance society. You guys would make him proud.
Does any one know of availabe open source MS agent creation software. I am a school teacher and have students who need a little extra help from time to time. These kids seem to be very interested in this technology. We currently have students at our school who have their tests read to them or listen to a test on a tape recorder. I am thinking it would be interesting to have these kids sit at a computer and high light a test question, the character would then read the question to them. I know I can do this with the controle panel open but I believe many of them would want to chat and waste test time. I do want the characters to be visible as they read the questions though. I would like to be able to create content appropriate characters to help these kids.
I have also thought about creating tutoring brn files as well.
I have turned my kids on to the free version of HAL and they are loving it. I would love to put this technology to work in my classroom.

SHammer

[Art]

Shammer, welcome to the forum!

There are several programs that will probably do what you want.
I'd suggest trying the freeware version of MASH (Microsoft Agent Scripting Helper) available at: http://www.abhisoft.net/mass/

You can also get the MASS software there as well (Microsoft Agent Scripting Software). It will let you view all the possible animations for each respective agent character.

There's also Cyberbuddy's Story Builder program that allows you to create a script for each agant character complete with screen location, sounds, changing character identities, vocalizations and even singing! You would simply not enter a character's name and it would not show (as you mentioned).

There's a lot more on Agentland.com and other sites like Botspot.com.

Hal could do a lot of this for you but as mentioned, it would be difficult to keep the kids from chatting with the program.

Hope this helps!

[KnyteTrypper]

There are two programs available for creating agents. The Microsoft Agent Character Editor is a freeware app from Microsoft. It's moderately hard to use, but there are a lot of tutorials and such available for it. The CyberBuddy Agent Magic Character Builder is an easy to use shareware app for building basic characters. Not free, but not expensive. As far as I know, neither are opensource (meaning you can't have the source code for the apps, themselves). But there are a lot of developer's tools available from Microsoft.

[shammer]

Thanks for the info. I will check out the programs and let you all know how it goes.
     
SHammer

[spydaz]

i found that once you have made your character, you will need to make each animation for the character (paintshoppro) then you do as said above use Microsoft  agent Character editor. this way you can make the final ACS file.

you can also use POSER to make characters from VIRTUAL GIRL and other programs and to make animations and GIFS / JPEGS ( i find that HIGH QUAILITY JPEGS are the KEY)

ACE (agent character editor is floating around it is the best tool)

To maker free standing characters or scripts MASH & AGENTSHELL are good as they both are able to output scripts for use in visual basic projects or WEBSITES, so you could make a CARTOON SHOW out of your characters....