![]() ![]() As one-time Microsoft employee James Fallows phrased it, “The next billion times you typed ‘Dear …’ and saw Clippy pop up, you wanted to scream.”īy 2001, Clippy was getting pink slips from Microsoft. That improves the results in the test, but ruins the feature for people who know what they are doing.īy the late ‘90s, enough people knew what they were doing in Microsoft Word that Clippy was less a helpful friend than a chipper redundancy. So the designer makes the feature hold your hand through the process. The problem, according to a postmortem written by Microsoft employee Chris Pratley, was that Clippy was “optimized for first use.” What has happened is that the usability test showed that people who have never seen a feature before have trouble with it in the first hour of using it. If you had never used Microsoft Word before, this was nice! If you had used it before, Clippy was a nuisance. But with a digital assistant, you could theoretically just dictate what you wanted - “add footnotes to this document” - and get a result. In Clippy’s heyday, if you wanted to do something in Word - like, say, add footnotes - you had to know where the “Footnotes” menu item was, and how to navigate the preference window that popped up. The Big Idea behind Clippy was to move away from the strict, regimented flow of computer tasks. Automated assistants are a black box into which you place a request, and a response comes out the other end. The Assistant feature was meant to function, well, like an assistant: You could ask it to do something, and then it would perform the task … somehow. If you started a document with “Dear So-and-so,” Clippy figured out that you were writing a letter, and tried to offer help. Bob’s son, Clippy, had been born.Ĭlippy was ostensibly designed to make writing easier. ![]() In doing so, they released a metallic menace upon the world. In November of the next year, Microsoft released the latest version of its suite of applications, Office 97. But the underlying tech, like the “Microsoft Actor” file format, was updated and repurposed for a new project. Each of these dozen characters, moreover, has a distinct and often obtrusive personality Bob users interact with their PCs by communicating with a psychotic MTV rat, a coffee-drinking lizard, a submissive rabbit, a hostile parrot, and other oddly-behaved creatures.Īs a program, Microsoft Bob was a notorious flop, and little-known. As one edition of Soft-Letter put it at the time: In fact, virtually all interaction with the program takes place through these “friends of Bob,” who constantly move around the screen, making suggestions, juggling objects, and otherwise displaying symptoms of pseudo-spontaneous behavior. Guiding you through the house was a cartoon character that offered help and advice.īob was unveiled in 1995. Instead of using office metaphors for computer functions (folders, files, recycle bin), Bob arranged things in different rooms of a virtual house. The personal computer, still trying to shake off the assumption that it was a tool for writing office memos and playing games, was not quite mainstream yetĪmid this environment, Microsoft tried to create a friendlier, approachable operating system - a debacle known as Microsoft Bob. In the mid-’90s, Microsoft was exploring how to make personal computing more approachable to consumers who might never encounter a PC in an enterprise environment. Eventually, the idea goes, you can hold full conversations with an AI chat bot, asking it to answer complex questions and undertake complicated tasks.īut nearly two decades ago, our current era of AI overload started with two simple sentences. Granted, a child with a relatively limited vocabulary and set of skills, but technically, that counts. The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were a person. You’ll hear people with titles like “chief experience officer” and “thinkfluence concierge” talk about “neural networks” and “machine learning” and “natural language processing.” Alexa, Siri, Cortana … the Google Assistant? There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence.
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