I remember in the late 90s Microsoft introducing text-to-speech recognition through those characters. I hooked that wizard up to the output from my IRC client. Anytime a message would come to the channel with my name, the wizard would speak the message. Of course, within a few minutes, the entire channel was flooded with people calling me dirty names. Good times.
I didn’t recognize it either, but apparently it is because I was too old. I’d recognize the original AOL client, certainly, but AOL Desktop was apparently released in late 2007. By that time I was using cable internet, WindowMaker and KDE.
I'm old enough, my first PC was a Tandy 386-SX33 and I found my first BBS by looking it up in the yellow pages and dialing it on a self-installed yard sale $1 2400 baud ISA modem, I'm just uncertain as to why this exists or what one would use it for.
Then again, I never installed the AOL desktop, so that might be part of my confusion, that and I don't imagine there are many other people I could use this with in my circle of weirdos.
I remember in the late 90s Microsoft introducing text-to-speech recognition through those characters. I hooked that wizard up to the output from my IRC client. Anytime a message would come to the channel with my name, the wizard would speak the message. Of course, within a few minutes, the entire channel was flooded with people calling me dirty names. Good times.