from Hacker News

Dr. Sbaitso

by bovermyer on 6/5/25, 1:13 AM with 13 comments

  • by tartoran on 6/5/25, 6:24 PM

    I remember this came with a SoundBlaster card back in the early 90s. This was the delight of the adults back then (I was just about 10 then) who got fooled into getting hours and hours of psychotherapy sessions from Dr Sbaitso. And it kindof worked... But it's amazing how a simple program could give the appearance of thinking whereas most of it happened inside our own heads responding to questions. Nowadays we have LLMs which while they don't use deflection as the main trick, we are still projecting some kind of intelligence to it.

  • by nullc on 6/5/25, 5:50 AM

    We long for the days when anything we do on computers was kept in strict confidence.

  • by anarticle on 6/5/25, 1:14 PM

    This was a fantastic piece of software that was included with your Sound Blaster card.

    At that time, it was uncommon to have a sound card, most computers had a PC speaker that produced beeps and in some really rare cases (Star Control 2 did this) played a low fi version of what would have been sound card output.

    You spent your $179, and suddenly games had some kind of midi/wav support.

    This had a synthesized voice at your machine which at the time was magical. I was completely blown away at the age of ten, and it definitely kept my interest in computing.

  • by omoikane on 6/5/25, 4:38 AM

    I prefer the versions hosted by archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=sbaitso

    Especially the "no voice" one, which runs much faster: https://archive.org/details/SBAITSO_TDY

  • by teel on 6/5/25, 6:35 AM

    I bought my first sound card SB Pro 2.0 in the early 90s and it came with Dr Sbaitso. We had lots of fun making it say different things, especually in our language (not English).

    I think it was the first time I heard synthesized text to speech, really cool at the time.

  • by westurner on 6/5/25, 5:39 AM

  • by pimlottc on 6/5/25, 2:51 PM

    Don’t forget the other demo - “I’m a talking parrot. Please talk to me!”

  • by dccoolgai on 6/6/25, 12:33 AM

    Parity error...