Peedy the Parrot: Interactive Music Assistant. David Kurlander and Microsoft's User Interface and Graphics Research Group. 1995. Duration: 4:55.

Shortly after I arrived at Microsoft Research, the User Interface and Graphics Research Group embarked on an effort to build an intelligent, conversational, animated 3D user interface, called "Peedy the Parrot". My role was that of naysayer. Knowing the current state of Artificial Intelligence technology, I was skeptical that we would be able to create a usable technology. While I believe my perspective was proven out over time, we still did manage to do some good research along the way.

On the project, I was responsible for the animation sequencing component. That component is documented in the CHI paper below:

David Kurlander and Daniel T. Ling.  Planning-Based Control of Interface Animation.  Proceedings of CHI ‘95.  May 1995.  pp. 472-479.  Denver, CO. 

The animation shown here was created as a video figure for that paper. In fact, the paper contains a broken link to this video, which disappeared during a revamping of the MSR web site. However, I have reanimated it here for your agent-based viewing excitement.

A video of a Peedy the Parrot demo during Bill Gates' 1995 Winter Consumer Electronics Show keynote is also viewable from this site. Several talented individuals contributed their sweat and brainpower to the Peedy project. Fellow members of Club Peedy included Gene Ball, David Thiel, Tim Skelly, Andy Stankosky, Maarten van Dantzich, David Pugh, Dan Ling, John Miller, and Trace Wax.