The Growth of Interactive Media

In 1986, you could put a moose on a Macintosh screen. He spoke aloud, moved his mouth to match the words and told jokes.

Canadian physician and programmer Steven B. Halls created the Talking Moose at a time when a recognizable face had to be assembled from black-and-white pixels. It didn't take many pixels to give this one a personality.

Today, talking computers usually bring up questions of artificial intelligence. The Moose's beginnings belong to another kind of story: a single programmer working out how to make a computer-generated voice seem to come from a character.

Why a moose, though?

It came down to the antlers.

Pictures of the original Talking Moose show a two-dimensional Macintosh character. With so little room for detail, its outline had to carry most of the work. Halls remembers that antlers were easy to recognize even when small. He also liked moose, which settled the choice.

Halls wrote the original program in assembly language. Getting the lips to follow the speech took some ingenuity. As Halls recalls, the program located Macintalk, the Macintosh speech engine, in memory. It watched information about the sound being played, then adjusted the Moose's mouth shape accordingly.

The speech engine's memory was not changed by this. The Moose was watching it. Early Macintosh software could access memory across applications in ways that modern operating systems generally restrict.

That same access let the character remark on window and document names in familiar applications. When the Moose seemed to know something about your work, it was responding to information on your own computer. Its behavior was programmed, with no language model behind the face.

Into Color

Around 1989, the Moose gained color. Halls kept a picture of that version on his wall, printed on an early Macintosh color printer. His account of the color Moose includes scans where the printing dots are still visible.

It is a small piece of computing history you can inspect, the character as it looked then, preserved on paper as well as in software.

Another kind of record came from old users. In a letter published in 2016, Mike Ellis remembered seeing the Moose at a Boston Mac Developers Group conference in the late 1980s:

"He became my constant companion on my Mac Plus, and he was widely admired by some of the cleverest developers I've ever known."

Among the recollections sent to Halls sits that letter. People still remembered the character well enough to write to its maker, decades after using the software.

Making a 3D Head Seem Alive

The later Windows Moose came with a three-dimensional head. Its ears moved and its eyes looked around. Eyebrows and mouth gave it more expressive scope than the original pixels could manage.

Playing the same animation clips over and over would have made those movements predictable. The Windows character used procedural animation instead, its motions generated by algorithms.

Halls's account of the animation describes controlled randomness. Each movement could end near a target, not at precisely the same spot every time. Both its speed and the pause before the next movement varied. Smooth acceleration and deceleration stopped the result from looking mechanical.

The lip-sync mechanism changed from one platform to the next. On Windows, timing information from Microsoft's Speech API told the character which mouth shapes to use. Recreating the old Macintalk memory-observation technique was unnecessary.

Something Useful to Announce

The Moose kept its jokes, but plugins added other things for it to talk about. News and weather joined reminders and notifications.

A June 2016 update described a working Pushover connection, IFTTT supplying the events for the Moose to announce. Approaching rain was the subject of one example. In another, a phone entering a home geofence triggered a spoken "Welcome home" on the user's PC.

Checking a screen for those messages was unnecessary. You could hear them.

A voice with a face

The original Moose appeared in 1986, some forty years before the current enthusiasm for AI assistants. Describing it as an early version of today's conversational AI would miss what Halls actually built. Speech synthesis and carefully written animation code were enough to make a joke appear to come from an antlered companion.

For Mike Ellis, that companion belonged on his Mac Plus. For the later Windows project, it could be the voice announcing rain or greeting someone arriving home.

Those early screenshots are still worth a look. It's plainly a face made of pixels, yet a former user remembered a companion. That's quite a result for a joke-telling moose.