The speaker asks the animated cartoon character on the screen to tell a joke and "Monty", a professorial type, obliges. He asks another cartoon image of a dinosaur named "Marge" to show the audience a happy face and her mouth curls into a cheerful grin.
The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is being given a demonstration of a blend of voice recognition software and computerised animation.
The speaker is Mr Eric Haseltine, senior vice-president in charge of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, a wholly-owned subsidiary that delivers new technologies to the business of making cartoon films. Mr Haseltine pointed out that "Marge" and "Monty" were actually developed by an Oregon company, Fluent Speech, but they perfectly illustrated the interaction between film-making and technology. "The very nature of film will change with the new technologies" which are coming on stream, he said.
The two characters respond on the basis of voice recognition and so they appeared to have some artificial intelligence, he said, but in fact all of their responses were dependent on prearranged scripts.
"Whether these things will be used (in films) or not I don't know," he said. "Certainly new media are going to be created," but each new development would not necessarily supplant what had gone before.