Does anyone else remember these retro Mac animated characters w/speech recognition?

[Torley]

Back to the 68k days with the Quadra 660AV/840AV, I recall a number of personal assistant-type cartoon faces could be paired with MacinTalk voices, to respond to your speech recognition needs. They were NOT the same as the voices themselves, and could be mixed and matched.

Here's one fleeting mention: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35951

One is shown in the lower-left of this fuzzy video:

Oddly enough, I can't find much info on them... anywhere at all! Even the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk article just says this, without listing a roster:

A graphical status monitor, often in the form of an animated character, provides visual and textual feedback about listening status, available commands and actions. It can also communicate back with the user using speech synthesis."

Another pointer, but doesn't have full visual profiles of them either: https://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/Speech.html

Does anyone else remember the full lineup?

 

[velocityg4]

I vaguely remember the characters. I played around with Plaintalk a lot. But I don't think I kept the characters open.

 

[dmr727]

I remember them quite well - my Dad's good friend had an 840av and I loved playing around with the speech recognition. Pretty cool stuff at the time!

 

[Torley]

Thanks for the memories!

@dmr727 Do you happen to recall the names of all the characters, or where I might be able to find them? This has been surprisingly difficult, given all the other Apple history that's well-archived out there.

 

[dmr727]

Thanks for the memories!

@dmr727 Do you happen to recall the names of all the characters, or where I might be able to find them? This has been surprisingly difficult, given all the other Apple history that's well-archived out there.

Ugh...no I don't - sorry. My Dad's buddy is a packrat, let me see if he still has his 840av system install CD-ROM. Might be able to build an emulator with an 840av ROM and see if System 7(.x?) can be installed. That'd be a good way to explore how it all worked.

 

[Torley]

If you make any progress on that I'd be curious. I wish I still had an image of my original hard drive to emulate.

If anyone remembers these characters, please share! Been doing so more searching but what's out there is patchy.

 

[Nermal]

Apple's "Legacy Recovery" CD has a set of floppy images that claim to be for an 840AV, including PlainTalk. I'm not sure whether they contain everything that was on the CD though...