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.