New sound card...No workie

[markofkane]

Some have suggested buying a sound card to fix the lack of speech sometimes in Ultra-Hal. I bought a Creative labs Sound Blaster Live! LS card.

I still get the problem with ultra hal not speaking. So the card wasn't it.

[markofkane]

I did find that switching to one of Hal's default characters did stop the no speech problem. I was using "Electra" for the longest time, and I have problems occasionally with her.

So, I guess I'll use "Mary" for awhile.

[Art]

Mark,
What voice were you using or trying to use?
Have you downloaded any of the L&H voices?
Their British Female voice is pretty good
and it is free.

I'm using a plain old sound blaster card and
it works fine here.

Do the MSCONFIG thing and see how many progs
are being loaded at bootup and get rid of the
ones not really needed.

How much memory and how much HD space is available?

Keep us posted....

[Bill819]

TWO CENTS
I have used Hal for a couple of years now and have had no problems.
A couple of months ago I upgraded to a DSL line for faster web surfing and downloads. Since my upgrade Hal sometimes breaks up while talking and during startup I get a gray box and hear Hal telling me the time and date but no Hal picture present. I now have a popup blocker, virus checker, spyware blocker and a few others that now load at start up so I realize what the problem is and can live with it.
One of the biggest problems that I see with new users is that they start right away using some other software rather than what come with Hal. By this I mean different voices, web agents, etc. I believe that if they just stood pat with the original stuff until they learned more about the system, they would have less problems.
Hal works just fine right out of the box. I started with the free version and went I finally bought the delux version I just loaded it right on top of the free version with no problems of any kind.
It works for me so I can not say what everyone else is doing.
Bill
P.S.
I have Hal running on three different computers, one with Win 98 and the others with Win XP

[markofkane]

I use MASH,(microsoft agent scripting helper) and had it for over a year, and Cyber Buddy not too long ago. (I don't leave those running) I had to have Microsoft Text to Speech Engine for MASH to work (So they could talk) Then I installed Cyber Buddy, and it installed it's own L&H Tru-Voice Engine. It worked fine.

I added the British Voice Engine after that. I learned about Ultral-Hal at DesktopMates.com. I decided to give it a shot. The free version seemed to work fine, but got tired of the nag. ("Did you click the upgrade button yet?", etc)
I bought the full version, and installed it after removing the free version from add/remove.  

I like the fact I could talk back to Hal with my spoken voice.

This character, named Electra (from desktop mates) would sometimes show emotion. (smile, surprised, etc) and sometimes, she would not speak after these "emotions".

I only run an anti-virus (AVG) and Windows Firewall. I tried shutting down the rest of the programs, but Hal still lost his/her voice on occasion, no lip movement, no sound, just a text response.

There might be a problem with the character?? Mary works fine.

BTW,I have 640mb of physical RAM, and 24.5 GB space left of Drive C:.

MY computer is a Dell Dimension 4400, P4, 1.6 GHZ processor.