Dr. Sbaitso

Dr. Sbaitso is an artificial intelligence speech synthesis program released in 1992 by Creative Labs for MS DOS-based personal computers.

History

Dr. Sbaitso was distributed with various sound cards manufactured by Creative Labs (the name was an acronym for Sound Blaster Artificial Intelligent Text to Speech Operator) in the early 1990s.

The program "conversed" with the user as if it were a psychologist, though most of its responses were along the lines of "WHY DO YOU FEEL THAT WAY?" rather than any sort of complicated interaction. When confronted with a phrase it could not understand, it would often reply with something such as "THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM". Dr. Sbaitso repeated text out loud that was typed after the word "SAY". Repeated swearing or abusive behavior on the part of the user caused Dr. Sbaitso to "break down" in a "PARITY ERROR" before resetting itself.

The program introduced itself with the following lines: Example:

HELLO [UserName], MY NAME IS DOCTOR SBAITSO.

I AM HERE TO HELP YOU.
SAY WHATEVER IS IN YOUR MIND FREELY,
OUR CONVERSATION WILL BE KEPT IN STRICT CONFIDENCE.
MEMORY CONTENTS WILL BE WIPED OFF AFTER YOU LEAVE,

SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.

The program was designed to showcase the digitized voices the cards were able to produce, though the quality was far from lifelike. Its AI engine was likely based on something similar to the ELIZA algorithm.

See also

• ALICE
• ELIZA
• History of natural language processing