silent agent

[bilojax]

What could cause MS Agent to function properly in all ways except not produce any sound ouput?

I copied a VB6 program from one computer to another and on the new computer there is no sound when the agent is supposed to speak. The speech balloon appears normally and the text scrolls through it, but no sound output. On this same computer I have Musicmatch installed and the audio is fine on that program. On the old computer both Musicmatch and the agent produce sound output. Is there some kind of global setting I've overlooked on the new computer?

 

[DrJavaJoe]

Make sure the proper speech engine is installed on the new computer, you can download them free at:

http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/downloads/developer.asp

Two strings walk into a bar. The first string says to the bartender: 'Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ'. The second string says: 'Pardon my friend, he isn't NULL terminated'.

 

[bilojax]

Thans for the reply. Yeah, I checked that, both computers have merlin.acs in the same place.

I tried a short script in the VB immediate window (load agent...: agent.speak "test") to see if I could make him speak, and it was the same, balloon words but no audio output. Does anybody know if there is a more direct test, something equivalent to printing a test page on a printer?

 

[bilojax]

Well, I'm still working on this problem.

I got the idea to load another program that I have which has different voices from Merlin's and which has to work on computers that don't have VB6 installed, and so does its own load of the MS text-to-speech software.

When I loaded it, I did not get any messages about "file already exists", even though the software has a warning in that regard.

Also, after loading, I looked in the location where merlin resides c:\windows\msagent\chars\, and strangely enough I don't see any new characters - Merlin is still the only one there.

Here's the weird part - now, when I run my program, I get audio - only, it's not Merlin's voice, it's one of the new ones from this other program.

So, now I have the idea to download the entire MS text-to-speech engine off the web and install that, and see if Merlin's voice comes back. That download is happening right now - I'll report back if it changes anything.

Anyhow, I guess my problem is solved, or at least I have a workaround, the only problem being I don't like the new voice and would rather have Merlin's voice back. And I'd still like to understand why. As best I can guess, there realy is a component missing from my VB installation that is necessary for Merlin to speak, and that doing the other installation supplied a same-named component only for the other voice.

This especially perplexes me because I'm like 99% sure (the other 1% allowing for early alzheimers) that I didn't load anything but VB to get it to work on my other computer. Now, operating systems are different, Win ME before and Win XP now, so maybe that's the reason.

Has anybody else programmed anything using text-to-speech? Did you have to download anything else to make the audio work?

 

[bilojax]

Well, here's the solution, although I still don't know the reasons - I downloaded and installed the TTSE for microsoft Reader, the agent character file for Merlin, and the Agent language component, rebooted my system, and I had Merlin's voice back. I guess I should have done them one at a time so I knew which worked, but none of them told me to reboot and so I did them one after another thinking none had worked. Then I rebooted and, voila, Merlin was back.