The Microsoft Agent Frontier Empire is a community formed by Konnor88 on May 25th, 2018. It primarily focuses on Microsoft Agent characters and their development. This website is also the official website for TMAFE software, which can be found on the Products page.
Microsoft Agent was a technology developed by Microsoft which employed animated characters, text-to-speech engines, and speech recognition software to enhance interaction with computer users. Thus it was an example of an embodied agent. It came pre-installed as part of Windows 98 through Windows Vista. It was not included with Windows 7 but can be downloaded from Microsoft. It was completely discontinued in Windows 8. Microsoft Agent functionality was exposed as an ActiveX control that can be used by web pages. Microsoft provides four agent characters for free, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Agent website. These are called Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby. Some characters also shipped with Microsoft Office up to version 2003 as the Office Assistants and with Windows XP as search assistants. New Agent characters can also be created using Microsoft's development tools, including the Agent Character Editor. Agents can be embedded in software with Visual Basic for Applications and in web pages with VBScript, and automated tools for the purpose of simplifying this exist. However, web page agents are only compatible with Internet Explorer, since alternative browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox do not support ActiveX. Additionally, users of Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and later or owners of Microsoft Office 2000 and later are the only ones who have Agent software pre-loaded on their computers; others have to download the software and install it manually.
April 25th, 2020 - New Microsoft Agent Languages components were discovered, which include the languages of: Arabic, Basque, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. Not only that, but the TMAFE website has swapped to a different host. The site is now hosted on InfinityFree instead of DreamHost.