How an AI Roosevelt turns modern questions into stories from his lifetime

In August 1912, Theodore Roosevelt recorded campaign speeches for the Edison Company. The Library of Congress makes those cylinder recordings available today. They preserve something unusually direct: words spoken by the man himself, during an attempt to return to the presidency.[1]

Pressing play, however, cannot produce a new answer. That is the different proposition at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, which opened on 4 July 2026. Its AI avatar can converse with visitors, drawing on the historical material behind the library’s digital collection.[2]

Finding the historical counterpart

A September preprint by Microsoft and library collaborators explains the method. A model selects among 108 curated stories, builds an archive query and supplies a reason for the match. Another model composes the reply using the story and retrieved evidence.[4]

Their worked example begins with a question about social media. The system maps it to reaching the public, selects a story about Roosevelt’s voice and the press, and retrieves material about his use of the presidency as a bully pulpit. It then answers through that historical counterpart.[4]

That choice is an act of interpretation. Social media might invite a question about public persuasion, but it could also invite one about private correspondence, advertising or the speed of a rumour. The question supplies several possible paths into the past. The selected story makes one of them the conversation’s organising idea.

The voice is constructed too. The methods describe speech synthesis trained on a voice actor’s studio recordings. Curators can adjust the persona’s instructions, including diction and conversational behaviour. The encounter therefore combines archival selection, generated wording and a performed vocal identity.[4]

The older recordings make the social-media comparison less remote. Roosevelt recorded on cylinders for Edison in August 1912 and on discs for Victor the following month; rivals Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft recorded for Victor too. Electoral persuasion already travelled through a commercial recording industry.[1]

The institution behind the character

In the library’s own podcast, chief executive Ed O’Keefe and storytelling designer Charlie Melcher describe beginning with an unusual freedom: the project had no living president directing how his story should be presented. They wanted an immersive experience whose visitor could become an active participant.[3]

Microsoft’s account shows how that ambition affected the persona. Laura Hoffman, from its AI for Good Lab, describes trying to capture Roosevelt’s ability to connect with people. The company recounts a late-June encounter in which the avatar made a joke about senators.[2]

The same archive also supports the Campfire Reading Room, where people can ask questions and retrieve Roosevelt’s documents online. The avatar and the reading room offer different relationships with the material: one sustains a conversation with a character; the other gives a researcher somewhere to follow a document.[2]

The preprint reports deployment experience, not a controlled demonstration of historical fidelity or learning. Its authors identify systematic checks of answers and dedicated visitor research as work still needed.[4]

The evidence has a historical date; the answer has a present-day authoring process. Recognising both makes the encounter more interesting: a visitor hears a newly composed response, with a fixed and sometimes surprising record behind it. The past supplies the material. The museum is responsible for the voice that answers back.

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