GENERAL

Win32::MSAgent allows you to use the Microsoft Agent 2.0 OLE control in
your perl scripts. From the Microsoft Website: "With the Microsoft Agent
set of software services, developers can easily enhance the user
interface of their applications and Web pages with interactive
personalities in the form of animated characters. These characters can
move freely within the computer display, speak aloud (and by displaying
text onscreen), and even listen for spoken voice commands."

Since the MS Agent itself is only available on MS Windows platforms,
this module will only work on those.

PREREQUISITES

In order to use the MSAgent in your scripts, you need to download and
install some components. They can all be downloaded for free from
http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/devdownloads.htm

1. Microsoft Agent Core Components
2. Localized Language Components
3. MS Agent Character files (.acs files)
4. Text To Speech engine for your language
5. SAPI 4.0 runtime
Optionally you can install the Speech Recognition Engines and the Speech
Control Panel. The Speech Recognition part of MS Agent is not supported
in this version of Win32::MSAgent

For more information on installing the components of Microsoft Agent,
take a look at http://www.pvoice.org/msagent.html

INSTALL

To install this module you do the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

That should do the trick...

Then try to run the enclosed 'demo.pl'

Makefile.PL checks if we're on a Microsoft platform, and if the MS Agent 2.0 component
is installed (it uses Win32::OLE for this check). If those checks don't succeed, no
Makefile will be written. If you think this is an error, please notify me, and remove 
these checks by hand from Makefile.PL yourself and continue with the installation

SUPPORT

The MS Agent itself is supported on MS' public newsgroup
news://microsoft.public.msagent You can email the author for support on
this module.

AUTHOR

Jouke Visser
jouke@cpan.org
http://jouke.pvoice.org

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2002 Jouke Visser. All rights reserved. This program is
free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
terms as Perl itself.

The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included
with this module.