Office Assistant

The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office for Windows (versions 97 to 2003), in Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Project (versions 98 to 2003), Microsoft FrontPage (versions 2002 and 2003), and Microsoft Office for Mac (versions 98 to 2004). The Office Assistant used technology initially from Microsoft Bob and later Microsoft Agent, offering advice based on Bayesian algorithms.

Clippit, the default Office Assistant, as seen in Office 2000 through 2003 (top) and as the paperclip emoji (📎) on Windows 11 (bottom)

The default assistant in the English version was named Clippit, after a paperclip. Although the name Clippit was used in all versions of Microsoft Office that supported the Office Assistant feature, the assistant became commonly referred to by the public as Clippy, a name which later occasionally bled into Microsoft marketing materials.^[1][2][3][4] Clippy was the default Assistant, and by far the most notable (partly because in many cases the setup CD was required to install the other assistants), which also led to it being called simply the Microsoft Paperclip.^[5] The Office Assistant and particularly Clippy have been the subject of numerous criticisms and parodies. In November 2021, Microsoft officially updated their design of the paperclip emoji (📎) on Windows 11 to be Clippy.^[6]

Description

The Office Assistant was an intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office. It assisted users by way of an interactive animated character that interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office for Windows (versions 97 to 2003), in Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Project (versions 98 to 2003), Microsoft FrontPage (versions 2002 and 2003), and Microsoft Office for Mac (versions 98 to 2004). The default assistant in the English version was named Clippit,^[1] after a paperclip.^[7][8]

Technology

The Office Assistant used technology initially from Microsoft Bob^[9] and later Microsoft Agent, offering advice based on Bayesian algorithms.^[3] From Office 2000 onward, Microsoft Agent (.acs) replaced the Microsoft Bob-descended Actor (.act) format as the technology supporting the feature. Users can add other assistants to the folder where Office is installed for them to show up in the Office application, or install in the Microsoft Agent folder in System32 folder. Microsoft Agent-based characters have richer forms and colors, and are not enclosed within a boxed window. Furthermore, the Office Assistant could use the Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engine to provide output speech capabilities to Microsoft Agent, but it required SAPI 4.0. The Microsoft Speech Recognition Engine allowed the Office Assistant to accept speech input.^[10]

History

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.^[11] Microsoft concluded that if humans reacted to computers the same way they react to other humans, it would be beneficial to include a human-like face in their software.^[11] 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.^[11]

First introduced in Microsoft Office 97,^[12] the Office Assistant was codenamed TFC during development, with the "C" standing for "clown."^[13] It appeared when the program determined the user could be assisted by using Office wizards, searching help, or advising users on using Office features more effectively. It also presented tips and keyboard shortcuts. For example, typing an address followed by "Dear" would cause the Assistant to appear with the message, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"

Microsoft turned off the feature by default in Office XP.^[14] The feature was removed altogether in Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac.

 

Clippit, hidden

A small image of Clippit can be found in Office 2013 and newer, which can be seen by going to Options and changing the theme (or Office Background) to "School Supplies". Clippit would then appear on the ribbon.

In July 2021, Microsoft used Twitter to show off a redesign of Clippit, and said that if it received 20,000 likes they would replace the paperclip emoji on Microsoft 365 with the character.^[15] The Tweet quickly surpassed 20,000 likes and they then announced they would replace it.^[16][17] In November 2021, Microsoft officially updated their design of the paperclip emoji (📎) on Windows 11 to be Clippit.^[6]

Assistants

The default assistant in the English version was called Clippit.^[7][8] The character was designed by Kevan J. Atteberry.^[8][18] Clippit was by far the most notable Assistant (partly because in many cases the setup CD was required to install the other assistants), which also led to it being called simply the Microsoft Paperclip.^[5] The original Clippit from Office 97 was given a new look in Office 2000.

Apart from Clippit, other Office Assistants were also available:

• The Dot (a shape-shifting smiley-faced red ball)
• Hoverbot (a robot)
• The Genius (a caricature of Albert Einstein, removed in Office XP but available as a downloadable add-on)
• Office Logo (a jigsaw puzzle composed of four pieces, which was the logo for Microsoft Office 9x)
• Mother Nature (a globe)
• Scribble (an origami-esque cat)
• Power Pup (a superhero dog)
• Will (a caricature of William Shakespeare, removed in Office 2000).

In many cases the Office installation CD was necessary to activate a different Office assistant character, so the default character, Clippit, remains widely known compared to other Office Assistants.

In Office 2000, the Hoverbot, Scribble, and Power Pup assistants were replaced by F1 (a robot), Links (a cat), and Rocky (a dog). The Clippit and Office Logo assistants were also redesigned. The removed assistants later resurfaced as downloadable add-ons.

The Microsoft Office XP Multilingual Pack had two more assistants, Saeko Sensei (Japanese: 冴子先生), an animated secretary, and a version of the Monkey King (Chinese: 孫悟空) for Asian language users in non-Asian Office versions.^[19] Native language versions provided additional representations, such as Kairu the dolphin in Japanese.

Additional downloadable assistants

Since their introduction, more assistants have been released and have been exclusively available via download.^[20][1]

• Bosgrove (a butler)
• Courtney (a flying car driver)
• Earl (a surfboarding alien)
• Genie (a genie)
• Kairu the dolphin, otherwise known as Chacha (available for East Asian editions, downloadable for Office 97)^[21]
• Links (a cat)
• Max (a Macintosh Plus computer) (Macintosh)
• Merlin (a wizard)
• Peedy (a green parrot, which was ultimately reused in the first iteration of the BonziBuddy software)
• Ms. Saeko (available for Japanese editions, an animated secretary)
• Robby (a robot)
• Rover (a golden retriever, also featured as Windows XP Explorer's search companion.)
• The Monkey King (available for East Asian editions, downloadable for Office 97)

The 12 assistants for Office 97 could be downloaded from the Microsoft website.^[22]

Criticism

 

Clippit creator Kevan Atteberry discussing his much-maligned character at ROFLCon II

The feature drew a strongly negative response from many users.^[23][24] Microsoft turned off the feature by default in Office XP, acknowledging its unpopularity in an ad campaign spoofing Clippit.^[14] The feature was removed altogether in Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac, as it continued to draw criticism even from Microsoft employees.

The program was widely reviled among users as intrusive and annoying,^[25][26] and was criticized even within Microsoft. Microsoft's internal codename TFC had a derogatory origin: Steven Sinofsky^[13] states that "C" stood for "clown", while allowing his readers to guess what "TF" might stand for. Smithsonian Magazine called Clippit "one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing".^[27] Time magazine included Clippit in a 2010 article listing the fifty worst inventions.^[28]

Although helpful to brand-new users, and although introduced at a time when relatively few people had extensive experience with computers, Clippit was criticized for interrupting users and not providing advice that was fully adapted to the situation.^[2]

In popular culture

Clippit is the subject of numerous humorous parodies and references, including internet memes.^[2] It has been lampooned in multiple television series, including Family Guy, The Simpsons,^[29] The Office^[15] and Silicon Valley.^[30]

Parodies

In 2001, a Microsoft advertising campaign for Office XP included the now-defunct website officeclippy.com, which highlighted the disabling of Clippit in the software. It featured the animated adventures of Clippit (voiced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried) as he learned to cope with unemployment and parodied behaviors of the Office assistant.^[31] These videos could be downloaded from Microsoft's website as self-contained Flash Player executables.^[31]

There is a Clippit parody in the Plus! Dancer application included in Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition which is later included as Windows Dancer in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The dancing character Boo Who?^[32] is wearing a ghost outfit, roughly having the shape of Clippit's body, with a piece of wire visible underneath. Occasionally, the white sheet slips, and reveals the thin curve of steel. The description mentions "working for a short while for a Redmond, WA based software company, where he continued to work until being retired in 2001". It was also used in the "Word Crimes" music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic.^[33]

Vigor is a Clippit-inspired parody software—a version of the vi text editor featuring a rough-sketched Clippit.

On April 1, 2014, Clippit appeared as an Office Assistant in Office Online as part of an April Fools' Day joke.^[34] Several days later, an easter egg was found in the then-preview version of Windows Phone 8.1. When asked if she likes Clippit, the personal assistant Cortana would answer "Definitely. He taught me how important it is to listen." or "What's not to like? That guy took a heck of a beating and he's still smiling."^[35] Her avatar occasionally turned into a two-dimensional Metro-style Clippit for several seconds. This easter egg is still available in the full release version of the Windows Phone operating system and Windows 10.^[36]

On April 1, 2015, Tumblr created a parody of Clippit, Coppy, as an April Fools joke. Coppy is an anthropomorphized photocopier that behaved in similar ways to Clippit, asking the user if they want help. 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.^[37] In 2022, Tumblr created a YouTooz collectible of Coppy.

Multiple episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks feature a holographic character named "Badgey" who takes the anthropomorphic form of the communication badges featured in the series. The character is initially imbued with characteristics reminiscent of Clippit, but malfunctions and becomes a recurring antagonist.

Other pop culture allusions

In a June 2008 episode of the NPR show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! 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. Is this a business grave or a personal grave?" The segment has become one of the most requested by listeners for replay during "best of" reviews of the show.^[38]

In 2015, a music video directed by Chris Bristow was released for Delta Heavy's song Ghost, which features Clippit discovering Shania, a modern voice-activated digital assistant, and later on Clippit becomes angry upon discovering the modern landscape of the world.^[39]

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.

In Catherynne M. Valente's 2018 novel Space Opera, two humans have been whisked to a distant planet to take part in a music contest that could lead to humanity being destroyed. Soon after arrival, they are disoriented and in great danger, and find themselves confronted by a giant animated Clippy, created by a sentient AI collective based on what it had found was widespread on human computers.

See also

• Bing AI
• Microsoft Bob
• Ms. Dewey
• Tafiti
• Tay (bot)
• Talking Moose
• Virtual assistant

References

1. . Dickinson College. Archived from the original on 2007-02-12. Retrieved 2007-05-08. Clippit, the default Office Assistant
2. Cassidy, Benjamin (23 August 2022). "The Twisted Life of Clippy". Seattle Met.
3. Swartz, Luke. "Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior and Social Responses to User Interface Agents" (PDF). Retrieved 2 June 2017. Popularly known as "Clippy the Paperclip" (the default character, referred to in Microsoft Office itself as "Clippit")
4. Maggie Harrison (June 29, 2023). "Madman Brings Clippy Back as an AI". Futurism. The former Microsoft Office mascot — technically named Clippit
5. "The Microsoft Paperclip Is Back". Newrisingmedia.com. 2 June 2012. Retrieved 2016-02-10.
6. Broni, Keith (November 27, 2021). "Windows 11 November 2021 Emoji Changelog". Emojipedia. Retrieved December 20, 2021.
7. Freeman, Jan (2007-02-25). "Finding the grammar checker's frailties". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-02-25.
8. "Clippy". Oddisgood.com. Retrieved 2016-02-10.
9. Watters, Audrey (14 September 2016). "Clippy and the History of the Future of Educational Chatbots". Hacked Education. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
10. Bell, Gordon Scott. . msagentring.org. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved May 2, 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
11. G4TV. com. "g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy". Retrieved 4 June 2016 – via Internet Archive.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
12. "Microsoft Office 97 Released to Manufacturing". Stories. Microsoft. November 19, 1996. from the original on April 1, 2019. Retrieved November 22, 2016.
13. Sinofsky, Steven (December 16, 2005). . Microsoft Developer Network. Microsoft. Archived from the original on February 14, 2019. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
14. Luening, Erich (2009-10-27). "Microsoft tool "Clippy" gets pink slip". News.cnet.com. from the original on 2012-10-24. Retrieved 2010-09-05.
15. Cassidy, Benjamin (August 25, 2022). "The Twisted Life of Clippy". SeattleMet. Retrieved August 29, 2022. But nearly three decades after its genesis at the Redmond tech giant, Clippit—better known as Clippy—improbably lives on.
16. Chalk, Andy (July 14, 2021). "Microsoft threatens to bring back Clippy". PC Gamer. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
17. "Microsoft threatens to resurrect Clippy as an Office emoji". 14 July 2021.
18. Cole, Samantha (April 26, 2017). "Clippy's Designer Wants to Know Who Got Clippy Pregnant". Motherboard. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
19. "フミオ君のボヤキ 第14回 『ワード』のイルカ". Kaiyou-k.jp. 2004-07-18. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
20. . Microsoft Support. Microsoft. October 29, 2004. Archived from the original on July 9, 2010. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
21. . Microsoft. 1998-06-07. Archived from the original on 2007-04-16. Retrieved 2007-05-08.
22. "Microsoft Agent download page for end-users". Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2010-05-06. Retrieved 2007-05-08.
23. Cozens, Claire (April 11, 2001). "Microsoft cuts 'Mr Clippy'". The Guardian. London. from the original on May 1, 2019. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
24. "Microsoft banks on anti-Clippy sentiment". USA Today. February 6, 2002. from the original on May 1, 2019. Retrieved May 20, 2010.
25. . CNET.com. Archived from the original on 2006-06-26. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
26. publicblast (February 7, 2007). "Microsoft Word 2007 Review". CNET. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
27. Conniff, Richard. "What's Behind a Smile?" Smithsonian Magazine, August 2007 pp. 51–52
28. Chris Gentilviso (May 27, 2010). "The 50 Worst Inventions: Clippy". Time. Retrieved October 25, 2013.
29. "Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio".
30. Pershan, Caleb (June 20, 2016). "Silicon Valley Ep. 3.9: 'Pipey'". sfist. from the original on June 23, 2016.
31. . Microsoft. 2001-08-06. Archived from the original on October 10, 2003. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
32. . Microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 2005-02-14. Retrieved 2017-09-27.
33. ""Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes (Official 4K Video)" – via www.youtube.com.
34. Jessica Catcher (2014-04-01). "Clippy Returns in Microsoft Office April Fools' Day Gag". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2016-02-10.
35. "Found a Clippy Easter Egg in Cortana! - Windows Central Forums". Forums.windowscentral.com. 2014-04-15. Retrieved 2016-02-10.
36. Stephenson, Brad (November 1, 2017). "Amusing Clippy Easter egg found in Microsoft's Cortana". onmsft.com. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
37. Mallikarjuna, Krutika (April 3, 2015). "Coppy Was The Best Damn Thing That Ever Happened To Tumblr". BuzzFeed. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
38. "Clippy and Paula". NPR.org. 2013-12-28. Retrieved 2022-08-04.
39. Velez, Cat. "Delta Heavy 'Ghost' by Chris Bristow". Promonews. Retrieved 14 February 2023.

Further reading

• McMillan, Robert (March 2, 2024). "The Demoted Microsoft Worker Getting His Revenge". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved March 4, 2024.

External links

• Clippy discontinued in Office 12 2006-08-08 at the Wayback Machine
• (Quiet Office Logo, Kairu, Earl, F1)
• Clippy returns in Microsoft's April Fools' pranks
• Luke Swartz — Why People Hate the Paperclip – Academic paper on why people hate the Office Assistant
• at Microsoft.com