When President Theodore Roosevelt took time away from leading the country, he liked to ride horses, birdwatch and wrestle his kids on the White House lawn. “Sometimes I’d take off for a long tramp with just one aide and a walking stick, ducking away from the buzzing city. That’s how I kept my head clear, even when the world pressed in on all sides,” he told me.

Except he didn’t, of course.

It was a lifelike, AI-powered avatar of the 26th U.S. president I chatted with this week via “Talk with TR,” a new interactive experience that will greet visitors to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library when it opens in the Badlands of North Dakota on July 4, the day America turns 250 .

The 96,000-square-foot library and museum, which features a gently sloping roof covered with native grasses, stands on a butte west of the tiny town of Medora overlooking the Missouri River and Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The $450 million institution is a hybrid of physical and digital experiences, with the library’s entire searchable repository of archival material — hundreds of thousands of documents organized with the help of Microsoft AI technology — available both on site and online .

Immersive storytelling is key to engaging visitors with Roosevelt’s life, leadership and legacy.

With an experience like the new avatar, “people can not only connect with the written words of a historical figure but also gain a sense of their personality through human dynamics such as vocal intonation, body language and mannerisms,” Laura Hoffman, senior director and program manager at Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, which helped create the digital doppelganger, said in an interview. Conversations are rated PG, so visitors of all ages can ask questions.

As generative AI has become more sophisticated, museums, entertainment companies and educational organizations have increasingly turned to digital recreations that let audiences interact with historical figures, from Vincent van Gogh and World War II veterans to Abraham Lincoln, who returned to the realm of the living in 2024 to deliver a speech on criminal justice reform.

Speaking from a recreation of the White House Cabinet Room on a “Talk with TR” test site, the lifesize Roosevelt avatar answers in the same fast-talking, energetic voice Americans heard when the president championed civic duty, called for progressive democratic policies and famously used the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick” to describe his approach to foreign policy as president from 1901 to 1909.

Wearing his signature wire-rim spectacles, a cream waistcoat with a gold watch chain and his trademark mustache, the digital president gestures as he speaks, coming across as charming and accessible — a Roosevelt-centric ChatGPT or Claude in period dress.

“It is not perfect, it is not Theodore Roosevelt, but it gets many things right,” Michael Cullinane, senior historian for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, said in an interview. “The avatar’s understanding of major political moments in Roosevelt’s time is accurate and well explained to visitors. The avatar even manages to capture elements of Roosevelt’s attitude.”

To train “Talk with TR,” Microsoft relied on an extensive corpus of knowledge — from diary entries to letters, speeches and telegrams — held across 18 institutions including the Library of Congress and Harvard’s Houghton Library.

“The AI version of Theodore Roosevelt is built with multiple safeguards to ensure it reflects the historical record rather than a modern interpretation,” Microsoft’s Hoffman said. “Each response is linked back to source materials, allowing users to trace and verify the historical basis of what they are hearing.”

Roosevelt, Technology Early Adopter

While these safeguards help ground responses in the historical record, the system still faces challenges when moving from facts to more abstract interpretation.

“Big ideas prove the most difficult for the avatar,” said Cullinane, a history professor at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University. “This should be no surprise because ideas are the most human aspect of cognition. The avatar is reluctant to take a bold stand on matters of politics, ideology, historical interpretation or matters of opinion.”

Nor did it have a clear answer when asked to speculate what Roosevelt, who died 107 years ago, might think of his 21st century digital doppelganger.

“You lost me with that one,” it told me. “I’m no machine, never have been. I’m flesh, bone and a will that won’t quit. Best to stick to questions about life, grit or America’s work. Those I can answer all day long.”

Cullinane did note, however, that Roosevelt embraced technology in his lifetime.

“He was the first president to dive in a submersible watercraft, the first to fly in an early version of an aircraft and he personally used a steam-powered shovel to cut tracts from the Panama Canal,” Cullinane said. Perhaps, then, the early 20th century figure would have called the AI representation of him “bully,” a term he often used to mean grand or splendid before the word came to describe aggression or intimidation. He might say the same of the library’s location, which pays homage to the rugged landscape that shaped him.

Born in New York, the lifelong nature lover grew enamored of the frontier lifestyle during a 1883 trip to the Dakota Territory to hunt bison. A year later, he returned, seeking solitude after the deaths of his mother and his first wife, Alice, on the same day.

“I was half-crushed by grief,” AI Roosevelt said. “Out there in North Dakota, wrestling cattle and blizzards, I found my strength again. Those wild hills built the backbone I carried to the White House.”