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This menu-driven program enables you to create computer 'characters', save them to disc or tape, make them hold conversations with each other or with yourself, and up to two characters can be in memory at once.

There are three ways you can inject some personality into your characters: starters, keywords and responses. Each character must have at least one starter and may have up to four. Starters are used randomly by characters to initiate a conversation or as a fallback utterance if no keyword has ben recognised in the course of the conversation. A typical starter might be 'Nice to see you again'.

Keywords and their responses are where the fun starts. A character may have up to 42 keywords which it recognises and responds to (131 if a second processor is attached) and keywords can have more than one response allocated to them. Thus the keyword 'Knightsbridge' might trigger off 'This is the Knightsbridge Double Glazing Emporium' or 'Mr Jones at your service'.

In addition, keywords can be flagged with an asterisk. These 'stems', as they are referred to, enable the first part of one character's response to be repeated as the final part of another character's answer. Thus, if you flag the keyword 'they say' with the response 'What do you mean' and make it a stem, a character saying something like 'They say love makes the world go round' will get the reply, 'What do you mean, they say love makes the world go round?' Stems also replace words such as 'you', 'are' and 'I've' with 'me', 'am', 'you're', etc.

As with all computer-generated conversation, it's not difficult to fool the machine into spouting nonsense. Also, conversations tend to be extremely elliptical with characters always talking at cross-purposes.

The (generally excellent) manual somewhat tackily suggests that you set up dialogues between a car and a horse, or the new year showing the old one out. For realism, therefore, you should create a pair of characters whom you wouldn't expect to listen too closely to each other. I showed the program to a non-computer literate friend who had fun creating a conversation between 'Scargie' and 'Thatch' (characters' names cannot be longer than seven letters) as well as devising a character with a nice line in selling life insurance.

Simon Dally