The Advance of Pop-Culture Trends

In 1986, a Macintosh could have a moose on its screen. He spoke out loud and told jokes, his mouth moving to match the words.

The Talking Moose was created by Canadian physician and programmer Steven B. Halls, at a time when a recognizable face had to be built out of black-and-white pixels. Only a handful of pixels were needed to give it a personality.

Today's talking computers tend to prompt questions about artificial intelligence. 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?

Antlers played a part.

Pictures of the original Talking Moose show a two-dimensional Macintosh character. There was little room for detail, so its outline had to do much of the work. Halls remembers that antlers were easy to recognize even when small. He liked moose as well, and that settled the choice.

The first version was written by Halls in assembly language. The lips had to follow the speech, which took some ingenuity. The program located Macintalk in memory, as Halls recalls, that being the Macintosh speech engine. It observed the sound being played and then changed the Moose's mouth shape to suit.

None of this altered the speech engine's memory. The Moose was watching it. Early Macintosh software could reach across applications into memory, in ways modern operating systems generally restrict.

With that access, the character could comment on window and document names in applications users knew well. A Moose that appeared to know something about your work was reacting to information on your own computer. Behind the face was programmed behavior, not a language model.

The Years in Color

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

It's 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. A letter published in 2016 has Mike Ellis recalling the Moose at a Boston Mac Developers Group conference in the late 1980s:

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

That letter sits among other recollections sent to Halls. Decades after using the software, people still remembered the character well enough to write to its maker.

Making a Three-Dimensional Head Feel Alive

The later Windows Moose had a three-dimensional head. Its ears moved; its eyes looked around. More expression came from its eyebrows and mouth than the original pixels could manage.

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

Controlled randomness is what Halls's explanation of the animation describes. A movement could end near a target rather than at exactly the same spot each time. Its speed varied too, as did the pause before the next movement. The result avoided looking mechanical, thanks to smooth acceleration and deceleration.

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. There was no need to recreate the old Macintalk memory-observation technique.

Something useful to say

The Moose kept its jokes, but plugins added other things for it to talk about. Reminders and notifications were joined by news and weather.

A June 2016 update set out a working Pushover connection, in which IFTTT supplied events for the Moose to announce. One example warned of approaching rain. 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. A joke could appear to come from an antlered companion, thanks to speech synthesis and carefully written animation code.

Mike Ellis felt that companion belonged on his Mac Plus. The later Windows project could make it 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. Quite a result, for a moose that told jokes.