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In 1986, you could put a moose on a Macintosh screen. He talked aloud and told jokes, with his mouth moving along with the words.

Canadian physician and programmer Steven B. Halls created the Talking Moose, back when a recognizable face had to be assembled from 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. A different sort of story covers the Moose's beginnings: one programmer figuring out how a computer-generated voice could seem to come from a character.

So why a moose?

Antlers helped.

The original Talking Moose appears in pictures as 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.

Halls wrote the original code 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. Watching data about the sound being played, it then adjusted the Moose's mouth shape to match.

This left the speech engine's memory untouched. The Moose was observing that memory. In those days, Macintosh software could access memory across applications, something modern operating systems generally restrict.

That access also let the character comment on window and document names in familiar applications. Information on your own computer was what a seemingly knowledgeable Moose was responding to. Its behavior was programmed, with no language model behind the face.

The Color Years

Color arrived for the Moose around 1989. A picture of that version, printed with an early Macintosh color printer, hung on Halls's wall. 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.

Old users supplied another kind of record. Mike Ellis, in a letter published in 2016, recalled seeing the Moose at a Boston Mac Developers Group conference in the late 1980s:

"Some of the cleverest developers I've ever known admired him widely, and he became my constant companion on my Mac Plus."

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

Giving a 3D Head Life

A three-dimensional head belonged to the later Windows Moose. Its eyes looked around, and its ears moved. Eyebrows and mouth gave it more expressive scope than the original pixels could manage.

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

Halls's account of the animation describes controlled randomness. A movement could end near a target rather than at exactly the same spot each time. Both its speed and the pause before the next movement varied. The result avoided looking mechanical, thanks to smooth acceleration and deceleration.

The lip-sync mechanism changed with the platform. On Windows, the character took timing information from Microsoft's Speech API to choose its mouth shapes. Nobody needed to recreate that old Macintalk technique of observing memory.

Something Useful to Say

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

A working Pushover connection appeared in a June 2016 update, with events for the Moose to announce supplied by IFTTT. In one example, the Moose warned of approaching rain. In another, a spoken "Welcome home" played on the user's PC when a phone entered a home geofence.

There was no need to keep checking a screen for those messages. 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. Calling it 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.

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