The company created their own cartoon character that was somehow sillier than a talking green parrot: a talking purple monkey. It would sit on your desktop all the time, talk to you every once in a while, and you could ask it to do things likewell, frankly, it wasnt that useful, but it sure was fun to hear it talk. Microsoft had intended these assistants to be bundled with other programs, but Bonzis assistant was designed to help with everything. Third-party developer BONZI Software used Peedy as the first version of its standalone helper program BonziBUDDY. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XPs installation process. The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the Wizard, Robby the Robot, Genie the Genie, and Peedy the Parrot.
These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a users behalf. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. In Microsofts collective mind, this meant they should start putting faces and voices on their screens, so people would enjoy using their computer more.Īgent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in Microsoft Bob (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes). The default skin for Office Assistant was Clippit (commonly shortened to Clippy), a paper clip with googly eyes and a penchant for bothering you as soon as you started working on a document. That much at least makes some sense to us now, but who in their right mind would think that youd want a purple cartoon monkey to help you use the internet in 1999.Īs part of the Office 97 release, Microsoft introduced Office Assistant, an animated character that would pop up to help you do things as you worked. Bonzi Buddy For Android Download The CuteĪlexa, Siri, Google, and even Cortana are household names, and we just sort of accepted the idea that a disembodied, vaguely human-sounding voice can help us do routine tasks.
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