Many years ago, some researchers at Xerox PARC hacked Barney to be an interactive interface, to the amusement of many. Here is a longer writeup: https://douris

Many years ago, some researchers at Xerox PARC hacked Barney to be an interactive interface, to the amusement of many. Here is a longer writeup: https://dourish.com/barney/index.html https://dourish.com/barney/index.html And an excerpt: Using the Barney Protocol Stack, we built a number of applications for Barney. Some were simply feedback applications, that would tell you the progess of activities such as printing your document. Some were monitoring applications that revealed the state of other systems, such as the current network status. Some were communicative applications, such as one which allowed two people to communicate through "Barney semaphore". So far, getting Barney to say things he doesn't already know how to say still eludes us. We know he uses LPC encoding, but we don't know how the LPC information is striped across the transmitted packets. So for now, our Barney applications can only say things that Barney already knew how to say on one of his applications. The up-side of this is that Barney is always in character; he'll say "Super-dee-duper" rather than "print job accepted". The down-side of this is that it's very hard to find instances of Barney saying negative things; so he'll say "Please try again" (the most negative thing he has to say) instead of "your stupid printer messed up again". You can read a paper about this work that will appear in the CHI'99 conference https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/302979.303021 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/302979.303021.