Help required with MS Agent and SAPI5

[nouma...@gmail.com]

Dear Anup,

Greetings, while googling around about MS Agent and SAPI5 connection I
came up with your article about GMan. First of all, I really liked the
idea of it. And I plan to extend the work from where you left. But
currently I'm in a fix with my project. My requirement is to use a
realistic character with realistic voice quality. All the stage is
set. I have MS character from Guile3d and TTS engine from Cepstral.
Everything seemed green when I suddenly came to know that my TTS is
SAPI5 based and MS Agent by default only supports SAPI4.
For past two days, I've been searching around for a realistic SAPI4
TTS engine or a workaround to connect MS agent to SAPI5. Your comment
in GMan article has given me hope. Kindly explain me how I can
accomplish connecting SAPI5 with MS-Agent. Your help will be really
appreciated. A quick and prompt response is what I need desperately
right now.
I tried to send you an email at your gmail account but it bounced
back. I'd really appriciate if you send me the reply at my email
nou...@maknom.com asap. otherwise I'll be checking this group for your
reply anyways.

Regards,
Nouman.

[Anup Shinde]

Hi,

 

SAPI 5 is now supported on Vista. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms695905.aspx

 

A workaround -> You can see one of the FAQs from microsoft on this.

 

(from: http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/prodinfo/faq/speech.asp#speak5)

 

Can Microsoft Agent characters speak using SAPI 5 text-to-speech engines?

No, Microsoft Agent was written to support SAPI 4 and the Speech development team at Microsoft did not provide for any backward compatibility in SAPI 5 for any prior versions.

If there is a SAPI 5 text-to-speech engine that you really want your application to use and you can create or commission a custom Microsoft Agent character, there is an alternative available for you to try if you also are not particularly concerned about accurately synchronizing a Microsoft Agent character's mouth movements with the output from the SAPI 5 text-to-speech engine. This alternative requires the custom Microsoft Agent character to have a looping animation of the character's mouth moving as if it were speaking. Your programming will need to call upon the SAPI 5 text-to-speech engine and trap the event that is raised when the engine has completed outputting the passed text. During this time, your programming should have the custom Microsoft Agent character playing the looping animation with the mouth movement.

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Hope this info helps.

 

Thanks and regards,

Anup Shinde.