The Birth of Tech Nostalgia

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 built the Talking Moose in an era when any recognizable face had to be assembled from black-and-white pixels. Only a handful of pixels were needed to give it a personality.

Questions about artificial intelligence tend to follow today's talking computers. The Moose's beginnings belong to a different sort of story: one programmer working out how to make a computer-generated voice seem to come from a character.

Why a moose?

The antlers helped.

The original Talking Moose appears in pictures as a two-dimensional Macintosh character. Since there was little room for detail, much of the work fell to its outline. As Halls recalls, antlers were easy to recognize at a small size. He liked moose as well, and that settled the choice.

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

None of this altered the speech engine's memory. It was the Moose that did the watching. Accessing memory across applications was possible in early Macintosh software, though modern operating systems generally restrict it.

That access also let the character comment 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. No language model stood behind the face; its behavior was programmed.

The Color Years

Around 1989, the Moose gained color. On his wall, Halls kept a picture of that version, printed with an early Macintosh color printer. Scans in his color Moose account still show the printing dots.

Here is a small piece of computing history to inspect: the character as it looked then, kept on paper as well as in software.

Former users supplied a further kind of record. 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."

Other recollections sent to Halls sit alongside that letter. Decades after using the software, people still remembered the character well enough to write to its maker.

Making a 3D head feel alive

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

The same animation clips, played repeatedly, would have made those movements predictable. Instead, the Windows character turned to procedural animation, with algorithms generating its motions.

Halls's explanation of the animation describes controlled randomness. A movement could end near a target rather than at exactly the same spot each time. The pause before the next movement varied, and its speed varied too. Smooth acceleration and deceleration kept the result from looking mechanical.

The lip-sync mechanism changed from one platform to the next. Timing information from Microsoft's Speech API told the Windows character which mouth shapes to use. The old Macintalk memory-observation technique did not need to be recreated.

Something Worth Saying

Jokes stayed part of the Moose, though plugins gave it other things to talk about. News and weather came alongside reminders and notifications.

A working Pushover connection appeared in a June 2016 update, with events for the Moose to announce supplied by IFTTT. One example gave warning of approaching rain. A phone entering a home geofence triggered a spoken "Welcome home" on the user's PC in another example.

You did not have to keep checking a screen for those messages. You could hear them.

A Voice with a Face

Between the original Moose's 1986 appearance and the current enthusiasm for AI assistants lie forty years. What Halls actually built would be missed by calling it an early version of today's conversational AI. Enough to make a joke seem to come from an antlered companion were speech synthesis and carefully written animation code.

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

The early screenshots still repay a look. It's plainly a face made of pixels, yet a former user remembered a companion. For a joke-telling moose, that is quite a result.