The Birth of Streaming

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. This one gained a personality from very few pixels.

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?

It came down to the antlers.

Images 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 recalls that antlers were easy to recognize at a small size. He also liked moose, which settled the choice.

The first version was written by Halls in assembly language. The lips had to follow the speech, which took some ingenuity. As Halls recalls, the program located 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 observing that memory. Early Macintosh software could access memory across applications in ways that modern operating systems generally restrict.

The character could also comment on window and document names in familiar applications, thanks to that access. Information on your own computer was what a seemingly knowledgeable Moose was responding to. No language model stood behind the face; its behavior was programmed.

The Years in Color

Around 1989, the Moose gained color. A picture of that version, printed with an early Macintosh color printer, hung on Halls's wall. 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.

Early users provided 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 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.

Making a Three-Dimensional Head Feel Alive

A three-dimensional head belonged to the later Windows Moose. Its ears moved and 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. Algorithms generating its motions gave the Windows character procedural animation instead.

The animation, as Halls explains it, uses controlled randomness. A movement could end near a target rather than at exactly the same spot each time. Its speed varied as well, and so did the pause before the next movement. Smooth acceleration and deceleration kept the result from looking mechanical.

With the platform, the lip-sync mechanism changed. Timing information from Microsoft's Speech API told the Windows character which mouth shapes to use. There was no need to recreate the old Macintalk memory-observation technique.

Something useful to say

Plugins gave the Moose other things to talk about, while jokes remained part of it. 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 gave warning of approaching rain. Another saw a phone entering a home geofence trigger 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 Voice with a Face

Between the original Moose's 1986 appearance and the current enthusiasm for AI assistants lie forty years. 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.

That companion, for Mike Ellis, belonged on his Mac Plus. It could announce rain or greet someone arriving home in the later Windows project.

Looking at the early screenshots is still worthwhile. It is plainly a face made of pixels, yet a former user remembered a companion. For a joke-telling moose, that is quite a result.