This tutorial is aimed at practitioner-level developers and is motivated by a desire to share with other developers the potential techniques, available tools and resources, and issues of interest augmenting the desktop with software agents.The tutorial will focus on integrating technologies for reuse, such as COM, Java, WFC, and XML to design, create, and deploy social interface agents. It covers underlying concepts (animation, character creation, speech recognition, text-to-speech) application design issues (interactions, turn taking, interruption, persistence, levels of confidence) and programming issues (IDES , commercial agent resources, and COM integration).The tutorial will demonstrate integration of software agents into MS Office applications, Web pages, and on the desktop. The session is primarily a 'hands-on' discussion, and presents 1) a conceptual framework and detailed design discussions for agent applications, and 2) an interactive demonstration using a standard IDE and other off-the-shelf resources to create the speech-enabled, animated social agents.