Manuel The Scottish Moose Speaks Your Tweets

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The folks over at Torchbox needed a Christmas card this year. Previously, the most poplar holiday card was a web page that gave their visitors a chance to activate a ‘snow machine’ and spray confetti on a random employee, all while being streamed online. They wanted to replicate this bridge between virtual and real life interactions this year, and Manuel the talking moose was born.

Manuel needed a personality and interaction from random people on the Internet so the Torchbox team decided to make the fake moose head speak tweets in real-time with the help of a Raspberry Pi. The code running on the Raspi gets tweets with a #tbxmoose hashtag, sends that through a node.js script, and finally sent to the Festival speech synthesis system.

A few modifications needed to be done to Manuel before he was presented to the Internet. His jaw was chopped in half and a servo and animatronic controller were added for a proper presentation on Torchbox’s stream of Manuel’s random musings.

10 thoughts on “Manuel The Scottish Moose Speaks Your Tweets

  1. 1) What makes it Scottish?
    2) “Moose” is an American term. The animals in Europe are called “Elk”.
    3) Moose (or Elk) are not native, do not live in the wild, in Scotland

      1. Except for the Scottish accent, it’s a reference to an episode of Fawlty Towers where the Major thinks that the moose head is talking to him, when really it is Manuel,

        “Hello. I can speak English. I learned it from a book”

  2. Gotta go moonbase alpha on this thing..

    “John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden John Madden ”

    “aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou aeiou ”

    “uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu”

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