Hacking My Nabaztag: Reading MSN Messages Out Loud With a Talking Rabbit (2008)

Archival repost - originally published on my old blog on December 12, 2008. Lightly cleaned up for dev.to; most of the tech mentioned here (Nabaztag, MSN Messenger, Messenger Plus! Live) has long since been discontinued, but I'm keeping the content as-is for the history.

A week ago I got my hands on a Nabaztag:tag - one of the first "smart" connected objects, years before "smart speaker" was even a category. It was a Wi-Fi rabbit made by a French company called Violet: it moved its ears, lit up in different colors, and had a text-to-speech voice.

Violet shipped an API with it, so you could script your own rabbit and make it do all sorts of things. My idea: have the rabbit read out messages people sent me on MSN Messenger while I was away from my keyboard ("AFK" for the non-geeks), so I could still hear what my friends were saying without being in front of the screen.

The rabbit has a text-to-speech feature built in - send it some text through the API and it reads it back as soon as it receives it.

Wiring MSN events to the API

The last piece was getting MSN to trigger the API based on its own internal events. That's where Messenger Plus! Live came in. Everyone knew this MSN add-on for its UI tweaks, but fewer people knew it also shipped a scripting environment: you could write your own commands using the JavaScript engine embedded in the add-on.

On top of the basic MSN events, Messenger Plus! Live exposed a whole set of extra event hooks, so all I had to do was implement the event handlers I cared about in my script.

Here's a short video of my first tests with NabKiller - that's the name I gave my rabbit:

Ideas I never got around to

A few things I planned to build on top of it:

• Have NabKiller warn me as soon as a new episode of a show I was watching came out, and tell me whether subtitles were already available - or ping me the moment they were.
• Give the rabbit some actual intelligence by hooking it up to a Pandorabot. Voldo was an example bot with that kind of AI at the time.

I like keeping this one around if only as a reminder that "smart home hack with a scripting API and a talking rabbit" predates the current wave of IoT and AI toys by over a decade.