VoxProxy, created and sold by RightSeat Software, is a great way to
bring an additional level of interaction to your PPT presentations. Using Microsoft Agent technology and animated avatars, VoxProxy allows you to add characters that interact with you, with each other, and with your presentation.

The characters delivered with VoxProxy include humans, aliens, wizards, robots, birds, even an airplane. (There are 28 in all.) If you want to see the characters, check them out on the Characters page of the VoxProxy site.

To put the product through its paces, I created a very basic script for a four slide presentation. It touches on the highlights of the process of script creation. As I created the scripts, I was amazed by the abilities of the characters. They can read, write, do magic, move, speak, and wait. In addition, each of the characters have their own special actions you have to see to believe.

VoxProxy as delivered contains two CDs: One is the main program CD and the other is a copy of the VoxProxy player. To use the product, install the main program CD onto a machine that has PPT 2000 or later installed. I installed it on a machine with PPT 2003 for the purposes of this article.

Once VoxProxy is installed, it is accessed from an additional menu added to the PowerPoint interface. The menu lets you access the help, the Web site, and (most importantly) the script editor. The script editor is where you will work with the VoxProxy characters for your presentations.

While the introduction suggests you take a look at the tutorials first, I skipped right into adding a script to an existing presentation. I started with my “No Bullets” presentation. Since it was designed to explain a topic, it seemed like a logical choice. My
plan was to add scripted comments instead of the text boxes to explain how to run the bullet-free presentation. I don’t recommend you follow my example. Watch the tutorials. I watched a couple of them when I got stuck and found that they helped immensely. They include great examples of the variety of things you can do with VoxProxy.

It took me about two hours to get the scripts done for four slides. If I had watched the tutorials and read more of the help before getting stuck, it would have gone faster.

The scripts I created for each of the slides were pretty basic. The format for commands is straightforward: Pick a character and tell
them what to do. The commands you will use most frequently are:

• Show - make this character visible
• Say - the words for a character to speak
• Move - change the location of the character, either to a region of the screen or an exact pair of coordinates
• Wait - Possible the most important of the commands, this tells the
  character to wait for someone else to finish or something to happen

• Hide - make the character go away

I learned a few things by playing around:

1. If you right click in the script for the slide, you get a context sensitive menu that can be used to add commands. It is much faster to do some commands this way. However, I found that I still started with the Wizard and used the right click menu for clean up and expansion of the slide.
2. Save frequently. You won’t loose data with VoxProxy, but it may seem like you do if your system is slow to respond during slide changes.
3. VoxProxy can be very addicting. I can see uses for this all over the place.
4. Getting the timing right can be very hard. I had a problem on my machine that the speech didn’t always play. If another character was listening for the speech, the script never moved on. I had to make sure there was an extra action command that could complete run before the speech started. This allowed enough delay for the listening command to be processed before the speech started.

Distribution:

Once my scripts were done and the presentation ran from end to end, I was ready to run it on another machine. VoxProxy comes with a second CD that is the player. You can install that player on other machines to run your presentation. There are big warnings not to install the player on a machine with full up VoxProxy installed.

Packaging of the presentation is a straight forward process that creates a folder with the presentation, the agents, the needed software, and the scripts for your project. Once the folder is created by VoxProxy, you copy the folder contents to a CD and run the presentation wherever you need to.

Conclusion:

VoxProxy is worth the money to get and the time to learn. It helps make your presentations more interactive whether they are being run with a presenter or stand-alone. If you still aren’t sure, go to their site and get the trial download. I think you will find yourself using the product enough to justify the purchase.