Reigate History
Reigate & Redhill DVDs and associated local history
The First Days of Podcasts
A Macintosh in 1986 could show a moose on its screen. He talked aloud and told jokes, with his mouth moving along with 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. This one gained a personality from very few pixels.
Today, talking computers usually bring up questions of 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 pick 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 recalls that antlers were easy to recognize at a small size. He also happened to like moose, so the choice was settled.
Halls wrote the original program in assembly language. Making the lips follow the speech took real ingenuity. As he recalls it, 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.
None of this altered the speech engine's memory. The Moose was observing that memory. 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. 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.
The Color Years
Color arrived for the Moose around 1989. On his wall, Halls kept a picture of that version, printed with an early Macintosh color printer. The scans in his color Moose account still reveal the printing dots.
You can inspect this small piece of computing history, the character as it looked then, preserved in software and on paper.
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 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. People still remembered the character well enough to write to its maker, decades after using the software.
Giving a 3D Head Life
The Windows Moose that followed had a three-dimensional head. Its ears moved; its eyes looked around. Compared with the original pixels, eyebrows and mouth allowed far more expression.
The same animation clips, played repeatedly, would have made those movements predictable. The Windows character used procedural animation instead, its motions generated by algorithms.
The animation, as Halls explains it, uses controlled randomness. Rather than ending at exactly the same spot, a movement could finish near a target. Its speed varied too, as did the pause before the next movement. Smooth acceleration and deceleration kept it from appearing mechanical.
A different platform meant a different lip-sync mechanism. Timing information from Microsoft's Speech API told the Windows character which mouth shapes to use. Recreating the old Macintalk memory-observation technique was unnecessary.
Something Useful to Say
Plugins gave the Moose other things to talk about, while jokes remained part of it. News and weather came alongside reminders and notifications.
A June 2016 update set out a working Pushover connection, in which IFTTT supplied events for the Moose to announce. One example gave warning of approaching rain. In another, a phone entering a home geofence triggered a spoken "Welcome home" on the user's PC.
You did not have to keep checking a screen for those messages. Hearing them was enough.
A Face for a Voice
Forty years stand between the original Moose's 1986 appearance and today's enthusiasm for AI assistants. 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.
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.
The early screenshots still repay a look. A face made of pixels, plainly, yet a former user remembered a companion. Quite a result, for a moose that told jokes.
