All,
IMHO the MS agents are old school now that we have Haptek characters. The MS agents are limited to 256 colors and are not very photo realistic. My reading on the web leads to my suspicion that Microsoft will move to a different methodology to implement MS agents in the near future. The SAPI interface is showing its age as well, but that is a different topic.
On the downside I don't know if Haptek will stand the test of time. I couldn't find any recent press releases that suggest Haptek is getting a lot of support. I've written 3 emails to the company about their product and asked about developing content for their product. I got one reply from a person formerly associated with Haptek, but no replies from anyone in the company. Their forum is gathering dust too.
Still Haptek PeoplePutty is leading-edge tech and it makes for very cool characters. There are some implementation problems between Haptek and Hal, but I suspect some of those issues could be worked out by Zabaware.
I purchased Curious Labs' Poser 5 software as a start to creating Haptek characters. I haven't purchased PeoplePutty yet. I hoping Haptek will be updating their software by the time I figure Poser out. Poser isn't the only way to create images for Poser, it's just that I think it's one of the best ways. If I'm successful creating Haptek characters I'll post them here.
=vonsmith=