Archives to avatars: Microsoft AI powers the interactive president at new Theodore Roosevelt library

“Speak softly and carry a big prompt.”

That’s a bit of a hallucination of Theodore Roosevelt’s famed ideology, but a digital version of the 26th president of the United States is definitely worth talking to thanks to Microsoft technology.

With the opening of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D., earlier this month, visitors can interact with a lifelike, AI-powered avatar of Roosevelt and ask questions about his life, leadership and legacy.

The exhibit has attracted visits from President Trump — separated from Roosevelt by 125 years — and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who accompanied Microsoft President Brad Smith.

“Who better to put our avatar to the test than American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn on Sunday, where he shared a video of a clearly giddy Goodwin interacting with the Roosevelt avatar.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time,” Goodwin said. “I feel like I’ve lived with you for 10 years of my life when I wrote a first book about you.”

AI Roosevelt answered a few questions from Goodwin thanks to Box 1, the knowledge base backbone of the museum, powered by technology Microsoft helped create. According to a July 1 Microsoft blog post, the system is loaded with hundreds of thousands of archival documents, and AI is used to “organize, enrich and reconstruct fragmented materials into searchable, contextualized historical records.”

Box 1 and AI also power The Campfire Reading Room, a digital research tool that anyone anywhere in the world can use to search through Roosevelt’s writings, letters, images and historical materials.

Microsoft donated much of its work with the library through its AI for Good Lab. The company said it plans to release a paper documenting exactly how the technology works and to open source the software used in the project.

As technology evolves, the library will evolve with it, Microsoft said. When more documents are added to Box 1 or as generative AI improves, the Roosevelt avatar will automatically update with the additional context.

The goal is to leverage AI to help the institution speak directly to future generations.

“That’s why we call it a living library,” said Laura Hoffman, senior director of the AI for Good Lab. “One of the most challenging things for cultural institutions is to continue to keep their experiences feeling relevant and fresh. This is what’s great about AI technology: It will continue to get better and better.”