The included Sophia project is intended to be both instructive and fun. It is, at the most basic level, a chatterbox application with speech synthesis and speech recognition tacked on to it. I originally meant for it to be a showcase of what one can do with the System.Speech namespace, but as the project progressed, it became an obsession with how far I could push the concept of an artificial personality -- what could I do to make the personality seem more real? what could I do to make it more flexible? etc. Along the way, I had the help of my three children, ages 4 through 8, who often wouldn t even let me work on my computer because they were so busy playing with the demo application. This project is dedicated to them, and especially to Sophia, the youngest, for whom the application is named.