The theory behind the software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.

[4] Microsoft Agent was subsequently created by Tandy Trower in an attempt to offer technology that was more flexible and available to third-party developers to include in their applications and web pages.

[10] 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.

[11] However, web page agents were only compatible with Internet Explorer, since alternative browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox do not support ActiveX.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft Agent uses Speech API (SAPI) version 5.3 as its primary text-to-speech provider.

[13] The download supported SAPI 5.3 compatible speech engines, and also contained the character “Merlin”, which shipped with Windows Vista.