The use of Agents with mIRC

Peedy mIRC supports Microsoft Agent both through the Options dialog and through scripting. An agent is an animated character that can speak text and perform actions. With a little fiddling and tweaking you can make this agent speak to you, warn you about events on IRC, and even read entire discussions to you.

In order for mIRC to use Microsoft Agent, you must have already installed Microsoft Agent on your computer. If it is installed, you will see an Agents button in the mIRC Options/Sounds dialog that allows you to change settings related to the agent.

Genie If you have any problems with the instructions below please visit the Microsoft Agent page for more information or the Agents section in the mIRC help file.

Downloading and Installing Microsoft Agent

Step 1. From the Microsoft Agent download page, download the Microsoft Agent core components and install them.

Step 2. From the Microsoft Agent download page, download one or more Microsoft Agent character files and install them. They all work equally well, although Peedy the Parrot seems to be the most popular.

Step 3. From the Microsoft Agent download page, download one of the Text-to-Speech engines and install it.

Note: If you are using Windows XP, you may also need to download and install Microsoft SAPI 4.0 speech services.

Step 4.

Now that Microsoft Agent is installed, you should be able to make mIRC speak some text. Assuming you have downloaded Peedy, try the following commands.

Peedy says Hello, nice to meet you! /gload peedy peedy.acs

This command will load Peedy in the background and make it ready to listen to you. You will see a little parrot icon in the system tray. Be sure to specify the character filename with the /gload command (peedy.acs for Peedy, genie.acs for Genie, and so on).

/gshow peedy

This will make Peedy visible. You can use the /ghide peedy command to hide Peedy.

/gtalk peedy Hello, nice to meet you!

With this command you can make Peedy speak some text. Try it!

Step 5. You can now explore mIRC's built-in Agent support which can be found in the Options/Sounds/Agents dialog.

If you are into scripting, you can also find out about how to control Agent through scripting in the Agents section of the mIRC help file.

What else is there to do?

Download more characters from the MS Agent Ring. They offer characters like Oscar the Cat, Max the Dog, Santa and some Aliens!
You can download and install a Speech Recognition Engine so you can talk back to the Agent and have it perform certain tasks for you!
You can download and install the Speech Control Panel which allows you to view and customize various settings of the agents, speech recognition and text-to-speech engines.
You can make your own character! See this Microsoft Agent page more information.