- Early additions of the assistant put two random phrases together and I remember seeing "try this today, don't run with scissors."
- I remember internally calling the "genius", a different name until we were told not to use that name anymore. I think there was some legal story behind that. :)
- Version two was about getting the assistant "out of the box" and more interactive.
- I still have my shirt that I got from Sam Hobson with "the usual suspects" with many of the Office assistant characters in police lineup picture. I wear it when I feel nostalgic.
- It feels sad for me that I helped put Clippy in and I helped to take him out.
There's a lesser known Easter egg using the Assistant, I can't remember which version. Type "whodunnit" to get a cast of characters behind Answer Wizard, and its myriad tools and processes.
Disclaimer: I worked on Microsoft Bob. Later, I did a lot with speech reco and TTS. Social user agents are of interest to me.
I always felt like Clippit - specifically that default character - missed a big lesson of social agents; don't be smug. Clippy, as he's become known, didn't appear to be helpful. I get why that character was chosen, but ultimately it was a less than ideal choice.
I was not aware (or had forgotten) about the Japan region character. Yeah, that wasn't great.
Would have loved to have seen sidekicks introduced.
Fun story: Gilbert Godfrey, the comic, voiced Clippy in a series of Web Ads back when he was being, uh, clipped, in Office XP (eX-Paperclip). https://youtu.be/tu_Pzuwy-JY
Several years ago, I attended one of Godfrey's shows and brought along a Clippy t-shirt, which he gladly signed and posed for picture with. I donated it to the MS Archives.
Thanks Steve for the informative article. I really loved working on Utopia, it was an incredible introduction to Microsoft. Melina hired me and dropped me into this team that was really doing fun and interesting things.
Having not been on the Office product team, I never thought of the Assistant functionality as being a risk to the product's bottom line. The opposite actually; although relatively new, Office 97 was a juggernaut where everything was being included. If anything, including a colorful "guru" in hindsight feels like hubris.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with the Office Assistant was as you mention; it triggered too easily with a dizzying array of options. Or non-useful options. I've always felt like tools like this; whether physical, like a book, or digital, should only be on-demand. It should never interrupt.
I never try to dodge responsibility for The Friendly Character (the official acronym for TFC, the C language structure name for the Office assistant feature). It was a valiant try to make Office much more approachable for a broad set of customers. It was also a failure as a feature at that time.
The assistant was handicapped by having to operate with a relatively small amount of data (I assume Leviathan is coming in a future post of Steven’s) and lack of graphics capability and RAM of many PCs. I sometimes wonder what people would have thought of Clippy if the cloud resources available to Siri were available then. Relatively speaking, Clippy was dumb as a post.
Here is a funny story from doing customer visits prior to developing the Office 2000 plan. I visited an investment bank office in San Francisco. The offices were arranged such that the “important people” had window offices around the perimeter and the support staff had cubicles in the center. My first meeting was with the CIO in the nice corner office. He was irate about Clippy because he saw no use for it and it increased demand for system resources, which meant more cost per PC. That was a fun meeting. However, ALL of the support staff in the cubicles had the assistant up and customized to the cat, dolphin, or robot. In talking to them, they loved the assistant for the reasons we developed it – they thought it made their PC more friendly and fun to use. (I am guessing there is a ordering pizza for a billion people coming up too.)
Long before Clippy, I worked at a big bookstore in the southwest where we sold big stacks of WordPerfect and Lotus 123 at below cost because we knew that each copy sold would result in selling multiple copies of books on how to use the software. Why multiple copies? Because the software was almost always duplicated and shared with friends, who needed help in using their pirated copy!
It's worth mentioning that Nass and Reeves never really advocated one way or another for a 'social' interface. They just provided evidence that it's possible it elicit a social reaction from a human by displaying a human-like character on a computer screen. Their research created quite a contentious debate among the Computer-Human Interaction elite. One the one side you had those who believed no machine should ever try to be portrayed as a human and on the other you had pragmatists who insisted resistance is futile.
To elicit the effect in their research, Nass and Reeves drew on the knowledge of Frank and Ollie of Disney animation fame. Their advice to all artists is if you want to connect with an audience with a character, focus on the eyes. Hence, Disney's big eyes! That's the ingredient Nass and Reeves empirically discovered yielded the most salient response on a computer screen. So in classic Microsoft fashion, we took an ingredient and made a meal of it! (I'm looking at you tabbed dialog boxes and interfaces!)
I think JonD is spot on. Had 'The Friendly Character' been connected to a Bayesian learning network it would have become more intelligent over time. And had we had more than vector files with limited animation capabilities, I know we could have matched a fidelity more reminiscent of the film and animation industry of the day.
Even still, I'm not sure people have the same level of comfort (or emotional attachment) talking to a PC that they do a mobile device...even today. Meanwhile, people seem just fine typing with a bot in a chat window without needing big eyes or a seductive voice to prompt a natural language dialog.
I've mentioned working on WordArt in 1991 and meeting KarenFr on that project. When an Autodesk colleague and I went to CES in 1995, the biggest thing there was Bob, and frankly, we thought it was great, reminded us of the work we admired from the folks at General Magic, and we wondered if Bob could be a platform for launching the consumer products the brand-new Consumer Division was considering creating. So, when we saw GeoSafari, an educational product built outside of MSFT that was super-intriguing, and I sent an email to Karen about getting the Bob SDK that I guessed they must have had to create their product for hosting in Bob, like Great Greetings. In her response, she averred, I seem to recall because the SDK wasn't ready yet or something like that. That was the end of that, and of course the events of your story proceeded forward.
In 1997 I had left Autodesk and, as a consultant, ran engineering for General Magic for what became Portico which I describe these days as "Siri for Dumb Phones". We did a lot of what Siri and Alexa do today, using the brand new, still in bungalows at SRI Nuance technology. We had been aware of the work of Nass and Reeves, and so set up a meeting at their Stanford Labs. I read their book before we met them - it was/is great. We thought we should meet with them, based on the book.
When we were introduced, they introduced us to a woman who was running small company with them to create "Agents", agents being a term heavily associated with General Magic and their Telescript technology. They told us that they had worked on Java the Dinosaur, etc. in Bob, Clippy, and so on, et al. and they were consulting with others on doing so. I said, "Ah, so I can start calling you "The Bob Guys". Somehow, Cliff laughed but Byron not so much.
I let them know that, coming from me, that was a complement; I was (and still am) a huge fan of Bob and Clippy. It made me predisposed towards hiring them, and we did.
We got on great and, AFAIK, we were the first major voice service product that they did design work for.
And it was all because of Bob! MSFT, who invested in us, now owns the patents we wrote around voice persona design and implementation.
Thank you for the comment. IT was no doubt a golden era of computer books. The local Tower Books in bellevue WA was always filled on Friday nights with people. We used to track the interest in a product or technology by how many new books appeared and were in print.
At CES in 1995, there was a product that was built to be a Bob application, written by a third party ISV. My memory says it was a GeoExplorer application, but Google delivers no joy. Does anyone remember what it was?
Yes... some fond memories.
- Early additions of the assistant put two random phrases together and I remember seeing "try this today, don't run with scissors."
- I remember internally calling the "genius", a different name until we were told not to use that name anymore. I think there was some legal story behind that. :)
- Version two was about getting the assistant "out of the box" and more interactive.
- I still have my shirt that I got from Sam Hobson with "the usual suspects" with many of the Office assistant characters in police lineup picture. I wear it when I feel nostalgic.
- It feels sad for me that I helped put Clippy in and I helped to take him out.
There's a lesser known Easter egg using the Assistant, I can't remember which version. Type "whodunnit" to get a cast of characters behind Answer Wizard, and its myriad tools and processes.
Disclaimer: I worked on Microsoft Bob. Later, I did a lot with speech reco and TTS. Social user agents are of interest to me.
I always felt like Clippit - specifically that default character - missed a big lesson of social agents; don't be smug. Clippy, as he's become known, didn't appear to be helpful. I get why that character was chosen, but ultimately it was a less than ideal choice.
I was not aware (or had forgotten) about the Japan region character. Yeah, that wasn't great.
Would have loved to have seen sidekicks introduced.
Fun story: Gilbert Godfrey, the comic, voiced Clippy in a series of Web Ads back when he was being, uh, clipped, in Office XP (eX-Paperclip). https://youtu.be/tu_Pzuwy-JY
Several years ago, I attended one of Godfrey's shows and brought along a Clippy t-shirt, which he gladly signed and posed for picture with. I donated it to the MS Archives.
Thanks Steve for the informative article. I really loved working on Utopia, it was an incredible introduction to Microsoft. Melina hired me and dropped me into this team that was really doing fun and interesting things.
Having not been on the Office product team, I never thought of the Assistant functionality as being a risk to the product's bottom line. The opposite actually; although relatively new, Office 97 was a juggernaut where everything was being included. If anything, including a colorful "guru" in hindsight feels like hubris.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with the Office Assistant was as you mention; it triggered too easily with a dizzying array of options. Or non-useful options. I've always felt like tools like this; whether physical, like a book, or digital, should only be on-demand. It should never interrupt.
I never try to dodge responsibility for The Friendly Character (the official acronym for TFC, the C language structure name for the Office assistant feature). It was a valiant try to make Office much more approachable for a broad set of customers. It was also a failure as a feature at that time.
The assistant was handicapped by having to operate with a relatively small amount of data (I assume Leviathan is coming in a future post of Steven’s) and lack of graphics capability and RAM of many PCs. I sometimes wonder what people would have thought of Clippy if the cloud resources available to Siri were available then. Relatively speaking, Clippy was dumb as a post.
Here is a funny story from doing customer visits prior to developing the Office 2000 plan. I visited an investment bank office in San Francisco. The offices were arranged such that the “important people” had window offices around the perimeter and the support staff had cubicles in the center. My first meeting was with the CIO in the nice corner office. He was irate about Clippy because he saw no use for it and it increased demand for system resources, which meant more cost per PC. That was a fun meeting. However, ALL of the support staff in the cubicles had the assistant up and customized to the cat, dolphin, or robot. In talking to them, they loved the assistant for the reasons we developed it – they thought it made their PC more friendly and fun to use. (I am guessing there is a ordering pizza for a billion people coming up too.)
Long before Clippy, I worked at a big bookstore in the southwest where we sold big stacks of WordPerfect and Lotus 123 at below cost because we knew that each copy sold would result in selling multiple copies of books on how to use the software. Why multiple copies? Because the software was almost always duplicated and shared with friends, who needed help in using their pirated copy!
Great memories, we also had that stupid genie that I had to make work on IPTDWEB to showcase the potential. 🤦♀️
It's worth mentioning that Nass and Reeves never really advocated one way or another for a 'social' interface. They just provided evidence that it's possible it elicit a social reaction from a human by displaying a human-like character on a computer screen. Their research created quite a contentious debate among the Computer-Human Interaction elite. One the one side you had those who believed no machine should ever try to be portrayed as a human and on the other you had pragmatists who insisted resistance is futile.
To elicit the effect in their research, Nass and Reeves drew on the knowledge of Frank and Ollie of Disney animation fame. Their advice to all artists is if you want to connect with an audience with a character, focus on the eyes. Hence, Disney's big eyes! That's the ingredient Nass and Reeves empirically discovered yielded the most salient response on a computer screen. So in classic Microsoft fashion, we took an ingredient and made a meal of it! (I'm looking at you tabbed dialog boxes and interfaces!)
I think JonD is spot on. Had 'The Friendly Character' been connected to a Bayesian learning network it would have become more intelligent over time. And had we had more than vector files with limited animation capabilities, I know we could have matched a fidelity more reminiscent of the film and animation industry of the day.
Even still, I'm not sure people have the same level of comfort (or emotional attachment) talking to a PC that they do a mobile device...even today. Meanwhile, people seem just fine typing with a bot in a chat window without needing big eyes or a seductive voice to prompt a natural language dialog.
I've mentioned working on WordArt in 1991 and meeting KarenFr on that project. When an Autodesk colleague and I went to CES in 1995, the biggest thing there was Bob, and frankly, we thought it was great, reminded us of the work we admired from the folks at General Magic, and we wondered if Bob could be a platform for launching the consumer products the brand-new Consumer Division was considering creating. So, when we saw GeoSafari, an educational product built outside of MSFT that was super-intriguing, and I sent an email to Karen about getting the Bob SDK that I guessed they must have had to create their product for hosting in Bob, like Great Greetings. In her response, she averred, I seem to recall because the SDK wasn't ready yet or something like that. That was the end of that, and of course the events of your story proceeded forward.
In 1997 I had left Autodesk and, as a consultant, ran engineering for General Magic for what became Portico which I describe these days as "Siri for Dumb Phones". We did a lot of what Siri and Alexa do today, using the brand new, still in bungalows at SRI Nuance technology. We had been aware of the work of Nass and Reeves, and so set up a meeting at their Stanford Labs. I read their book before we met them - it was/is great. We thought we should meet with them, based on the book.
When we were introduced, they introduced us to a woman who was running small company with them to create "Agents", agents being a term heavily associated with General Magic and their Telescript technology. They told us that they had worked on Java the Dinosaur, etc. in Bob, Clippy, and so on, et al. and they were consulting with others on doing so. I said, "Ah, so I can start calling you "The Bob Guys". Somehow, Cliff laughed but Byron not so much.
I let them know that, coming from me, that was a complement; I was (and still am) a huge fan of Bob and Clippy. It made me predisposed towards hiring them, and we did.
We got on great and, AFAIK, we were the first major voice service product that they did design work for.
And it was all because of Bob! MSFT, who invested in us, now owns the patents we wrote around voice persona design and implementation.
Thank you for the comment. IT was no doubt a golden era of computer books. The local Tower Books in bellevue WA was always filled on Friday nights with people. We used to track the interest in a product or technology by how many new books appeared and were in print.
At CES in 1995, there was a product that was built to be a Bob application, written by a third party ISV. My memory says it was a GeoExplorer application, but Google delivers no joy. Does anyone remember what it was?