How does Vox Proxy compare with MASH™?

Integration with PowerPoint®

• Scripts are developed interactively side-by-side with PowerPoint
• Scripts are automatically embedded in the PowerPoint PPT file by slide
• Navigation commands to go to any slide, last slide, next slide, etc.
• Scripts are triggered automatically on slide-change events.
• You can provide holds in scripts pending PowerPoint custom animation events. This allows you to wait for the user to trigger a slide animation and then have characters to react to that.
• You can trigger custom animation events, making it trivial for characters to display bulleted points, pictures, or other animation effects.
• Launch other slide shows
• The script development tools automatically display scripts from the currently-displayed file and slide, allowing for a REALLY user-friendly development environment.
• Combined with Vox Proxy’s user-defined variables, you can do some very sophisticated navigation, score-keeping, and other tasks. The end result is a seamless integration and control over PowerPoint that does not depend on timing things with your slide animations.
• Play scripts within the free Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 Viewer
  

Extension of Agent Facilities

• You can maintain a pronunciation dictionary without having to insert those as speech tags everywhere they appear. You can either maintain such items on a global basis (for all presentations) or embed them into the current PowerPoint presentation file. This is especially nice for specialized applications such as medical terminology.
• You can save custom “properties” for agent characters. For example, you can change a character’s default voice, pitch, or speed or set balloon defaults for characters. Once again, these can be applied globally or embedded in a specific presentation.
• Characters can gesture or point at other characters by name or at an open Window (for example, at an Excel or Explorer window)
• The ability of Agent to speak randomly-selected phrases is simplified and applied to animations, which is very useful if you are returning to a common slide or “menu” script. For example, the following is a valid script line. The system will play one animation at random:
  Acknowledge | Alert | Congratulate | CrossArms | HandsOnHips
• You can maintain preference items for several things, including file locations (where character files are located, for example). Preference items can be changed on-the-fly within a script.
• You can use system-defined and user-defined variables in scripts. This is technically beyond an extension of Agent facilities, but is so useful for Agent commands that I include it here. An example of many system-defined variables is $tod (time of day), which will return “morning” “afternoon” etc according to the system clock. A user-defined variable might be “&name1”. A simple example of speech using both would be:
  Say Good &tod! My name is &name1. Welcome to &place.
  Also available as system-defined variables are current drive locations, even if the script is being played from a CD drive. Variables have many and varied uses, and are a very powerful scripting tool. You can do arithmetic and logic with them, so you can keep score with them, use them for sophisticated navigation schemes, for evaluating user response to voice commands, and so on.
• Characters can be automatically scaled according to the computer’s resolution. This allows characters to appear the same relative size regardless of the system they’re played on (within the limitation of Agent’s pixilation, of course)
• During development, you can drag-and-drop characters into place on slides. The system will insert the appropriate MoveTo or Show at location.
• Character positions can be specified either as screen percentages or as right, left, top, bottom, or center. This makes all character locations independent of monitor resolution. In MASH, character locations other than left, right, center, etc are specified in pixels at the upper-left corner of the character image. When displayed on a computer with different resolution than authored, the characters will appear in different relative locations.
• You can turn on a “DualMonitor” mode, which will automatically relocate characters so they are visible on a projected image in a dual-monitor display mode, which many presenters use to allow them to see speaker’s notes while displaying a slide show. Using Agent (and MASH) alone, the characters always appear on the first monitor only (which is the wrong one while projecting).
• You can place “holds” (I call them “Waits”) in scripts not only to wait for other characters, but to wait for many other events, including time from start of slide show or start of current slide, time from start of various media events, wait for media to end, or for custom timers that you can trigger in your script. For media, this allows characters to narrate a movie, for example, with perfect synchronization regardless of system performance.
• Special features for AT&T Natural Voices, particularly for creating WAV files for delivery on CD (As with many copyrighted speech engines, Natural Voices cannot be delivered as an engine on a CD). You can enter text and convert it to wav files or you can let the program scan your entire script (all scripts in a presentation) and convert all speech for a given character to wav files using a specified AT&T voice.
• Wait/no-wait is simplified from one character to another. For example, if you want peedy to appear while Paul says something, it would look like this:
  Show Paul at left center
  Say I’d like to introduce my friend Peedy.
  Show Peedy at right center :nowait
  

Integration of Other Media Controls

• Microsoft Media Player. You can provide the user with controls or no controls. Simple check-box development tools allow you to either hold the script until the media ends or allow it to play simultaneously. Combined with the media-time Waits, this lets characters narrate movies, even if the user pauses and re-starts the media.
• Flash movies. You can open and close multiple flash movies simultaneously.
• Play various sounds and music. Volume fading allows you to reduce music volume when characters will be speaking and increase it when they are not.
• Display pictures and backgrounds
• These are all available whether you’re running within PowerPoint or from stand-alone “script macros”.
  

Programming for Non-programmers

• IF-THEN-ELSE structures
• SELECT-CASE statements
• Bookmarks (labels) and GOTO command for branching within the script.
• Read and write data from structured text files.
• User-defined variables are a very important programming feature
• An example using voice-command input might look like this:
  …
  Show Paul at center
  ListenFor "...Kitchen Faucets" "...Bathroom Faucets" "...Shower heads" "...Shower Valves"
  SELECT &Response
  CASE "...bathroom faucets"
  ;Here you would have script illustrating bathroom faucets; you might navigate to a different series of slides, launch another slide show, launch a script macro, etc.
  CASE "...kitchen faucets"
  …etc
  END
  

Miscellaneous Features External to PowerPoint

• Digital Clock display, including countdown or count-up timer or clock time
• Run external programs, including displaying web pages, Microsoft Word window, Notepad, or any program registered with Windows. Allows argument-passing.
• Input a text field, display a list selection box with results assigned to variables, display message boxes

Interact with Microsoft Excel®

Script Macros

User-friendly Development Tools

Output Formats

Samples

MASH script:

Paul.Show
Set Req = Paul.MoveTo(PaulLeftX, PaulCenterY)
WaitFor Req
Peedy.Show
Set Req = Peedy.MoveTo(704, 512)
WaitFor Req
Paul.Play "Greet"
Set Req = Paul.Play("RestPose")
WaitFor Req
Peedy.Play "Acknowledge"
Peedy.Speak "Hi, Paul."

Vox Proxy script:

Show Paul at left center
Show Peedy at 75 25
Paul Greet, Restpose
Say Good morning. My name is Paul.
Peedy Acknowledge
say Hi, Paul.

Script Notes:

1. Vox Proxy stresses simplicity and readbility, and implicitly performs programming functions that must be spelled out in MASH.
2. The "Set Req=" and "Waitfor Req" are programming artifacts that are done implicitly in Vox Proxy.
3. The locations in MASH must be in pixels at the top-left corner of each character, which will be incorrect if played on a computer with a different resolution setting. In Vox Proxy, locations are expressed as a percent of screen and are measured to the center of each character, so they stay fixed when played at any resolution.