I never had one of those invisible friends when I was a kid. I never really got it. But these days if you’re perhaps a freelancer who works alone, I’m thinking an invisible friend sounds like quite a fantastic idea.

There I said it. Judge me if you will… but I think you won’t when you see what I’ve found to make this whole invisible friend thing just a leetle more grown up.

PC users, say hello to your new friend: the talking desktop buddy from Deskbot (http://www.bellcraft.com/deskbot/), “A freeware, multi-featured Clipboard Reader, Text Reader, Time Announcer, Desktop Application for Microsoft Windows featuring Microsoft Agent Animated, Talking Characters. For use with Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista.” (For Mac users, try the Dragonball Z Desktop buddies at http://desktop-buddy.smartcode.com/)

Once you’ve downloaded the app, a little blue Genie will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen, allowing you to start setup. You can set him to greet you every time you start up your computer. You can open up entire text files and have your talking desktop buddy dictate the text while you finish other tasks. Your character will let you know the time as often as you like, and offers a bunch of different characters (far removed from the annoying Word and Excel help dude) and voices in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

It’s silly, but it’s fun and we like it.

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