One quarter of adults in the US lack basic literacy skills, one third have inadequate health literacy, and an even larger fraction lacks computer literacy. Rather than "dumbing us down", confusing us, dashing expectations, or raising anxiety levels, properly designed conversational character-based interfaces can actually simplify an interaction, making the interface not only usable, but engaging for many underserved populations, even in critical application domains such as medicine and health care. In this talk I'll describe my experiences over the last decade building these interfaces for health education and longitudinal health behavior change interventions in which users have had thousands of counseling sessions with animated health advisors at home, in the hospital and in outpatient clinics.