Office Assistant
It had a wide selection of characters to choose from, with the most well known being a paperclip called Clippit[1][2] (commonly referred to by the public as Clippy).
It assisted users by way of an interactive animated character that interfaced with the Office help content.
[1][7][8][9] Clippit was by far the most notable (partly because in many cases the setup CD was required to install the other assistants), which also led to him being called simply the Microsoft Paperclip.
Furthermore, Microsoft Agent characters could use the Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engine to provide output speech capabilities, but it required SAPI 4.0.
According to Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic", the concept of Clippit was based on a "tragic misunderstanding" of research conducted at Stanford University, showing that the same part of the brain in use while using a mouse or keyboard was also responsible for emotional reactions while interacting with other human beings and thus is the reason people yell at their computer monitors.
[13] As people already related to computers directly as they do with humans, the added human-like face emerged as an annoying interloper distracting the user from the primary conversation.
Microsoft turned off the feature by default in Office XP,[16] and as a result they focused most of their marketing on that change.
[18] On May 31, 2001, during the Office XP launch event in New York City, a man in a Clippit mascot costume interrupts the introduction and gives a speech begging for his job back before being dragged off stage by a comically large magnet.
[25][26] Despite the Office Assistant's intention of being helpful, it was widely reviled among users as intrusive and annoying,[27][28] and was criticized even within Microsoft.
Microsoft's internal codename TFC had a derogatory origin: Steven Sinofsky[15] states that "C" stood for "clown", while allowing his readers to guess what "TF" might stand for.
Later that same year, Microsoft hosted the TechEd 2007 conference, which featured a keynote opening that parodied Back to the Future.
[7] It has been lampooned in multiple television series, including Family Guy, The Simpsons,[44] The Office[40] and Silicon Valley.
[46] is wearing a ghost outfit, roughly having the shape of Clippit's body, with a piece of wire visible underneath.
Coppy would engage the reader in a series of pointless questions, with a dialogue box written in Comic Sans MS, which was deliberately designed to be extremely annoying.
A hypercasual game for mobile devices and on Windows and macOS via Steam called Progressbar95 features a spoof of Clippit as a common NPC, often part of annoying popups or carrying sticks of dynamite or guns to hurt the player's progress.
marking the occasion of Bill Gates transitioning to semi-retirement from Microsoft, humorist Adam Felber and comedian Paul Provenza ad-lib a scenario in which Clippit is being driven to a location outside of Redmond, Washington, at night and says such things as "It looks like you're digging a grave.
[49] In 2015, a music video directed by Chris Bristow was released for Delta Heavy's song Ghost, which features a saddened Clippit discovering Shania, a modern voice-activated digital assistant, and later on Clippit becomes angry upon discovering the modern landscape of the world.
[50] In the thirteenth season of the Dungeons and Dragons actual play show Dimension 20 (set in the world of Starstruck), Clippit was used as the basis of a planetary superintelligence called Gnosis in the far future.
Soon after arrival, they are disoriented and in great danger, and find themselves confronted by a giant animated Clippit, created by a sentient AI collective based on what it had found was widespread on human computers.
Clippit appears as a mentor non-player character in the artificial-intelligence-based air traffic control system for Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane, SayIntentions.AI.
