If you encounter difficulty developing your Microsoft® Agent application with speech, please refer to the following list of symptoms and try the suggested steps to isolate and solve the problem.

• When I query the character's Pitch property, it returns a value of -1.
• When my code attempts to set the TTS mode ID for a text-to-speech engine, I get the following error: An outgoing call cannot be made since the application is dispatching an input-synchronous call.
• The Map tag (or some other tag) doesn't seem to work..
• When the character’s volume is set to zero using the speech tag \vol=0\, it either has no effects or crashes the AgentSvr.
• When I use the ampersand "&" symbol, the text around the symbol in the character’s word balloons is truncated.
• Agent crashes when Speak is called with an audio .WAV file.

When I query the character's Pitch property, it returns a value of -1.

This occurs if the character has been compiled using a speech engine's default pitch property: that is, the pitch was not changed when the character was built.

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When my code attempts to set the TTS mode ID for a text-to-speech engine, I get the following error: An outgoing call cannot be made since the application is dispatching an input-synchronous call.

To set the TTSModeID property, you must have Speech.dll installed. This is typically a part of the speech engine's installation code. You may also install this by installing the Speech object control panel, available from the Microsoft Agent Downloads page.

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The Map tag (or some other tag) doesn't seem to work.

Some tags include quoted strings. For some programming languages, such as Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) and Visual Basic®, you may have to use two quote marks to designate the tag's parameter or concatenate a double-quote character as part of the string. The latter is shown in this Visual Basic example:

Agent1.Characters("Genie").Speak "This is \map=" + chr(34) + "Spoken text" _
+ chr(34) + "=" + chr(34) + "Balloon text" + chr(34) + "\."

For C, C++, and J++ programming, precede backslashes and double quotes with a backslash. For example:

BSTR bszSpeak = SysAllocString(L"This is \\map=\"Spoken text\"=\"Balloon text\"\\");
pCharacter->Speak(bszSpeak, ......);

Note that Microsoft Agent does not support all the tags specified in the Microsoft Speech API. In addition, support for some parameters may depend on the text-to-speech engine installed. For further information, see the Microsoft Agent SDK Documentation.

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When the character’s volume is set to zero using the speech tag \vol=0\, it either has no effects or crashes the AgentSvr.

This is a known problem. On Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me platforms, the character's volume does not change but will sustain at the previously set level. On Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Whistler platforms, this will cause AgentSvr to crash, even when a TTS engine is not installed. Since the range of the character's volume, from 0 (silence) to 65535 (maximum volume), is large and the difference between successive levels is hardly discernable, the easy workaround is to set the volume to 1 instead of 0 when you want the character's voice to be inaudible.

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When I use the ampersand "&" symbol, the text around the symbol in the character’s word balloons is truncated.

This is a known issue. You can work around this by using the map tag. For example to display "A & B" in the character’s word balloon, use "A \map="and"="&&"\ B" in the Speak statement.

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Agentsvr crashes when Speak is called with an audio .WAV file.

This may result when the character has been using TTS for spoken output and then changes to use an audio .WAV file without any text supplied in the first parameter of the Speak method call.

When switching to use audio .WAV files and you do not want text displayed in a word balloon, use a blank space character for the first parameter of the Speak method to avoid crashing.

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