Later versions of BonziBuddy in May 2000 featured its own character: Bonzi, a purple gorilla. The program also used a text-to-speech voice to interact with the user.

The voice was called Sydney and taken from an old Lernout & Hauspie Microsoft Speech API 4.0 package. It is often referred to in some software as Adult Male #2.Ī number of sources identify BonziBuddy as spyware, a claim the company disputed.