We have experienced a short power outage which caused a few hours of down time for SpeechAgents streaming server.

All systems are back online and all streaming services should be up and running.

Many of you may have noticed an error message during the sign-up process for both Free and Paid subscriptions. This gave the appearance that new accounts were not being created. Free Accounts were being processed correct, however, new paid subscriptions were not being posted.

We have pinpointed the problem and resolved all issues with the Sign-Up process so you should no longer be experiencing this issue.

If you experience any further problems with the Sign-Up process, please submit a ticket via the Contact Us page so that we may resolve it as quickly as possible.

Some users had reported being unable to complete the Sign-Up process due to the page not advancing when clicking the "Continue" button. This has now been resolved, however, if you experience any further problems, please submit a ticket on the Contact Us page.

As promised, our New Web Site and Billing System have now been implemented.

There may have been some intermittent downtime with our service today while the new site was being put online, however, our service should now be running correctly.

Previously, free users were able to create characters without an account, however, with our new site, free users must first create an account in order to begin placing new characters on their site.

All paid users should immediately be able to login as their accounts have already been migrated over to the new system.

The new site will allow paid members to keep track of their billing history, however, as this feature is new to our site, the billing history will start with only the most recent transactions.

We are also implementing our affiliate program which will allow Free and Paid members to earn money by sending customers to SpeechAgents to purchase our service. All visitors to our site from your affiliate links will be tagged with your Affiliate ID and any purchases they make will earn you a percentage of the sale.

If you are experiencing any problems with characters being displayed on your site or have any billing issues, please let us know by filling out a trouble ticket through the Contact Us page.

The new editor is now available for both Free and Paid Members. The Free editor will only give access to the first speech block, with a limit of 600 text characters, and can not save any of the text content for later editing. All characters created with the Free editor will contain small advertising around the player as well as branding, which is not seen on the Paid Members player, however, the remaining character and editor features are otherwise unchanged.

If you have any questions or experience any problems or bugs with the new editor, please submit a trouble ticket from the “Contact Us” page.

Our new toolkit (editor) is now online for paid subscribers. It can be accessed from the “My Account” page after logging into your account. The editor gives you access to more backgrounds, broken into easy to navigate categories, as well as faster loading times and the ability to drag and drop the character to position within the player.

The new editor will be available to Free Users within the next week or so, and will be accessible from the button on our main page as well as the link in the main menu of all pages on the SpeechAgents Web site.

We have many new features being developed that will be implemented into the editor, so be sure to watch our “News & Press” page for more information as they become available.

Please let us know if you find any problems or encounter any bugs in the new editor and we will address them as quickly as possible.

Our developers are nearing completion of a brand new Character Editor. The new editor has been written from the ground up for a more user friendly interface, more streamlined creation steps and a much quicker loading speed for selecting backgrounds.

The editor will be available to Subscribed Users first from within their paid account, and shortly following its initial release, it will be made available to all free users directly from the front page of our site as well as a link from the main menu of all pages on Speechagents Web site.

This new editor should fix any of the bugs that have been reported with our existing editor, but will address the primary complaint of the loading time required before creating characters.

Keep an eye on your email box, as we will send out a message to all of our customers the first part of this month when the new editor is available

We apologize for the delay in realzing the problem with the Internal Mailing System. This has effected the following areas of of our website:

• Activation of new accounts by email validation
  
• Retrieval of forgotten passwords
  
• Submiting Help Tickets
  
• Other minor Email Notification Services
  

Again, we apologize for the delay in realzing this problem, and it has now been resolved. Please refrain from reporting this issue through the ticketing system now that it is functioning again.

We have received many reports of intermittent service outages with portions of SpeechAgents. This includes the Website itself, the Character Editor and the audio portion of the Character Creation process.

All of these issues are directly related to updates we are performing on our service which we had hoped would only take a few days, however, due to some minor, unforeseen issues, it is taking our developers longer than expected to roll-out all of the updates.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and assure you that in the end these necessary updates will benefit our service in speed and features as well as preparing for some major changes in our service offerings.

Many of you may have noticed intermittent connectivity issues with SpeechAgents service over the past few days while we were initiating upgrades, however, we had a major service outage today with the backbone connectivity to our ISP. We are monitoring the situation and hopefully everything has been resolved.

If you have any questions about your Subscription account, please contact us through our ticketing system at http://www.speechagents.com/help.cgf

Many of you may have noticed SpeechAgents was experiencing some technical issues today with the creation of characters. We have been performing some configurations on our service for performance enhancements, which caused some unforseen down time in the character generation system.

We apologize for this situation and are working ensure this does not occur in the future.

As always, if you have any questions about this or any other aspects of SpeechAgents service, please feel free to submit a ticket through the “Help & Support” page.

We have finally added additional voices to choose from when creating your characters, which currently include the following:

2 Male and 2 Female U.S. English Voices
1 Male and 1 Female U.K. English Voice
1 Male and 1 Female Americas Spanish Voice

Our developers are working on adding more voice languages, such as French, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc.

Later this week, we should have a major update to include many new characters as well.

As always, if you find any problems with the Character Generator after the update, please let us know so that we can address any bugs that may have been overlooked.

We did a server update today which may have caused about 5-10 minutes of interrupted service. This update was necessary in preparation for the introduction of New Characters and Text-to-Speech Voices.

We hope to have the new Characters and Voices available sometime this week.

Sometimes you may not wish to have a character on your site, but would still like to have your message delivered to your visitors, therefore, we have added the option of generating an audio-only player.

Subscribed users (Silver, Gold and Platinum) will find the audio-only option as the last character in the Character List of our editor. Currently, the audio player is standard white, however, we will be adding additional skins to better fit with the color scheme of your site.

As always, if you experience any problems with this new feature, please submit a trouble ticket on our “Help & Support” page.

Our Silver Level subscription has been reduced from $9.95/month to $7.95/month. This is an open-ended special and the price could return to normal at any time.

Please feel free to let our Customer Support Department know about your opinions on our pricing structure as well as any features you would like to see implemented.

We have made 2 changes to our Character Editor that were requested by many customers.

• Many people were confused by where the ‘Clipboard’ was located when selecting the code button. We have now added the code visually in a popup window to allow you to manually highlight and copy the code if you choose.
  
  
• We have had an overwhelming request for the ability to choose how the character plays. We have added a drop-down box with the following 3 choices:
  
  Always Play: Automatically plays everytime the page is viewed
  Play Once Per Visit: Automatically plays once, per visitor, per 30 minute period
  Must Press Play: Will not play unless the visitor clicks the Play Button
  NOTE: The “Play Type” option is only available to paid subscribers. Bronze user accounts are pre-set to “Always Play”.
  

If you experience any problems with these new features, please submit a help ticket to our Support Center.

We are happy to announce that our developers have completed the SpeechAgents “MySpace Quick Character Generator”.

This will allow anyone to place a SpeechAgents Character on their MySpace page for free. Simply visit our MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/speechagents to access the Generator and place a character on your own MySpace page.

If you have any questions about the MySpace Character Generator, you can simply leave us a message at our MySpace page.

SpeechAgents had a short outage this weekend due to hardware issues. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers, and we are working hard to sort out any issues to allow us to stabalize our services.

If you have any questions concerning this outage and your account, please feel free to contact us at the “Help & Support” page.

Some of our customers had experienced a bug in the “Character Toolkit” and the “Character Player” that caused them to notice the text "%20" being displayed in place of all spaces through out their text as well as being spoken by their character.

This was a minior glitch that occured during our last upgrade near the end of October and has been fixed. If you experience the "%20" issues, simply clear out the cache from your browser so that it will re-download the fixed copy of our “Character Toolkit” upon your next login.

We have redesigned the “Charater Toolkit” slightly to be more optimized for fast character generation and a easier flow. We have also added “MySpace Code” and “RAW Code” for Silver, Gold and Platinum Level members.

“RAW Code” should be used on sites where the standard “Website Code” does not work due to policies against the use of Javascript on certain community and hosting companies.

For those that that haven’t noticed, we have also increased the streams for both Gold and Platinum Users, as well as increasing the number of text characters for Platinum users from 600 to 1,200.

Please report any problems or bugs you may experience with the new “Character Toolkit”

The new features introduced this month caused a few bugs that were brought to our attention after the changes were already uploaded to the live servers.

The new feature put in place to remember if a visitor had already heard your character speak, and would automatically mute the character on each return visit to the site within a 30 minute period, was only to be used for Website Code and was not to effect eBay Code, however, the update pushed this change to all generated code, thus causing eBay Characters to give the appearance that they were not speaking.

An additional minor bug in the eBay Code Generation caused newly created characters to not display at all on eBay. Both of these bugs have been fixed. If you have experienced any problems with new characters not showing up on eBay within the past 36 hours, please re-generate those characters and the problem should be resolved.

We are constantly improving our service with new feature requests, and we try our best to thoroughly test each new feature before pushing it to the live servers, however, some unforseen bugs occassionally slip through the cracks, but we address them the moment we are informed of the problem.

We apologize for any inconvenience these issues may have caused and will continue to do what we can to improve your experience with SpeechAgents.

The following long awaited features have finally been implemented this month by our development team:

• Three (3) new characters have been added to our Library.
  
• Bronze Level users now have access to four (4) characters rather than the original two (2) characters.
  
• Paid customers will only be charged one (1) stream for each individual visitor over a 30 minute period. If a visitor refreshes the page or returns within 30 minutes, you will not be charged an additional stream.
  
• If a returning visitor has already heard your character speak, it will not automatically begin speaking again upon re-visiting the page during a 30 minute period from the first visit. They will still be able to click the play button to get your character to begin speaking again. This will cut down on the frustration from customers about their visitiors hearing the same thing repeated over and over.

As always, we continue to work hard to implement new requested features as quickly as possible and there are many additional features that should be released within the coming weeks.

Service Issues:

Many of you may have noticed our service was either slow loading or not loading at all when you visited our site during the first half of this week.

We had been experiencing issues with our upline connection to the Internet backbone through faulty hardware with ICG, Inc, providing the bandwidth to our servers. They have replaced the fault equipment and you should have noticed the current increase in speed and stability.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused your during these unforseen circumastances.

Feature Updates:

We are currently implementing 2 new character models which will be available by Monday or Tuesday, the week of July 31st - August 4th.

There have been many inquiries into the status of our large and small player size, so we would like to update everyone on the proposed implementation of this feature.

We currently have 2 types of character models, refered to as 3D Realistic Style and Cartoon Style. The 3D Realistic style characters are generated different than the Cartoon Style to ensure a more realistic appearance, however, this limits the characters ability to be resized without ill effects on the character quality and functionality. Our Cartoon Style characters, however, are very robust and fast loading with the ability to be easily resized.

We are nearing completion of implementing the choice of the small and larger character player, however, that feature will only be visible in the “Character Toolkit” when a Cartoon Style character is selected. You will still be able to use our 3D Realistic Style charaters as you always have, simply without the ability to have them set within a smaller player.

Many new features are in developement, so please check back often for updates on their progress.

Our new caching system for web site code has been integrated into the production site. This should not alter the way accounts operate, however, everyone should notice an increase in the speed at which their characters load in the player once placed on a web site.

The initial stream of a new or edited character will load at the normal speed, and each subsequent stream will load very quickly.

We are currently working on ways to increase the speed at which Auction characters load, so be sure to check back often as our service and its features are constantly improving.

Please let us know if you experience any problems with your account or how characters display on your site to ensure the cache system is working properly.

We are currently working on a new caching system which will dramatically increase the speed at which our characters are displayed.

Backend upgrades usually do not effect the current live system, however, our upgrade builds this evening caused a short service outage at 8:45PM MST. During the 10-20 minute outage, vocal services were unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience as this issue has been resolved.

The following features are either in developement or nearing release:

• International registration fields (province, municipality, country, etc)
  
• New player caching system, which will allow characters to load more quickly
  
• Remembering which users viewed your character within the last 30 minutes so their hits are not counted as additional streams.
  
• Remembering when a customer has already listened to or muted your character within the last 30 minutes so that they do not continue to hear your character repeat itself when returning to your page.
  
• Adding the choice for a Small or Large character player so that it can better integrate into your site or auction listing.
  
• Adding the ability to upload your own background images.
  
• Adding the choice of having the characters eyes follow the mouse after it is finished speaking.
  
• Implementing a detailed FAQ System along with a Forum and Animated Online Tutorials to walk you through most aspects of your SpeechAgents account.
  

We continue to work hard to implement new features to make our service more beneficial to our customers. If you have any ideas on new features you would like to see implemented, or comments on our planned features, please feel free to contact us: Email Customer Support

COMplete Technologies, an Internet Services Company based in Peyton, Colorado, has released their newest service called SpeechAgents.

For a monthly subscription fee, SpeechAgent customers can place Animated, Talking Characters on their Web Sites and eBay Auctions.

A spokesman for COMplete Technologies described the benefits of this type of service from a customer point of view:

“What customers are missing out on by shopping online, compared with shopping locally, is the one-on-one experience they are accustom to. With SpeechAgents, you can give your customers that comfortable shopping experience from miles away, removing the fear and uncertainty they have with online sales.”