The Shape of Gaming

In 1986, you could put a moose on a Macintosh screen. He spoke out loud and told jokes, his mouth moving to match 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. It didn't take many pixels to give this one a personality.

Questions about artificial intelligence tend to follow today's talking computers. The Moose's beginnings tell a different kind of story, that of one programmer working out how to make a computer-generated voice seem to issue from a character.

So why a moose?

The antlers helped.

Photographs of the original Talking Moose present a two-dimensional Macintosh character. With little room for detail, its outline had to do much of the work. As Halls recalls, antlers were easy to recognize at a small size. He also liked moose, which settled the choice.

Halls wrote the original program in assembly language. Getting the lips to track the speech required some cleverness. In his recollection, the program found Macintalk, the Macintosh speech engine, in memory. It observed information about the sound being played, then adjusted the Moose's mouth shape to suit.

This didn't change the speech engine's memory. The Moose was simply watching it. Early Macintosh software could access memory across applications in ways that 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 seemed to know something about your work was responding to information on your own computer. Its behavior was programmed, with no language model behind the face.

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. His color Moose account includes scans with the printing dots 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:

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

That letter sits among other recollections that were sent to Halls. Decades on from using the software, people remembered the character well enough to write to its maker.

Making a Three-Dimensional Head Feel Alive

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

Those movements would have become predictable if the same animation clips played over and over. Algorithms generating its motions gave the Windows character procedural animation instead.

Halls's account of the animation describes controlled randomness. Rather than ending at exactly the same spot, a movement could finish near a target. Its speed varied as well, and so did the pause before the next movement. Smooth acceleration and deceleration kept the result from looking mechanical.

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

Something useful to say

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

You didn't have to keep checking a screen for those messages. You could hear them.

A voice with a face

Forty years separate the original Moose's 1986 appearance from the current enthusiasm for AI assistants. Calling it an early version of today's conversational AI would miss what Halls actually built. Enough to make a joke seem to come from an antlered companion were speech synthesis and carefully written animation code.

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.

Looking at the early screenshots is still worthwhile. 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.