My four year old son made a new friend yesterday. Her name is Michelle. He doesn't quite understand it, but he likes her. She's the computer generated voice in Windows XP.

If you go to the Control Panel, click on Speech, and go to the Text to Speech tab, you can type in a sentence and press "Preview Voice" to hear the sentence spoken with a computer simulated voice. One of the voices provided is called Michelle.

Tyler will talk for a long time with Michelle and he doesn't seem to realize that his dad is typing in all of Michelle's words before she says them. He treats her like a real person and enjoys answering her questions and talking to her.

I'll have to try it on his six year old brother to see what he thinks of it. For now, Tyler has a new friend. I just hope Michelle doesn't break his heart if he falls in love with her.

One of my interests in university was Artificial Intelligence. After studying the existing work, I came to the conclusion that the AI world was (for the most part) off-base. It's pointless to try to simulate the high level aspects of intelligence without any lower layers. Programming a computer to analyze newspaper articles is useless if they can't understand that "things fall" and "water spills".

That got me thinking what the best way would be to tackle AI. I decided that you should start with the most primitive instincts and build up from there. The most critical basic instinct is probably fear. I would start by making a creature that would be afraid. It would recoil away from anything that changed quickly and would try to stay still as much as possible.

I would have to follow it up quickly by needs - hunger, curiosity, and so on. The creature would have to balance its needs against its fears. It would have to venture out into the world unless its fear took over and made it recoil.

I never had the opportunity to really pursue this, but I always thought it would be an interesting approach. Maybe when I retire (many years from now), I can play more with these ideas.