Microsoft Agent Clippy Download
Briana Habbyshaw
We can learn from Clippy. The renewed interest in conversational agents in the tech industry often overlooks the aspects that affect efficient communication, resulting in failures. It is important to learn lessons from the past and design interfaces and algorithms that tackle the needs of humans rather than hyping the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft provided four agent characters for free, which could be downloaded from the Microsoft Agent website. These were called Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby. Some characters also shipped with Microsoft Office up to version 2003 as the Office Assistants and with Windows XP as search assistants. New Agent characters could also be created using Microsoft's development tools, including the Agent Character Editor.
Agents could be embedded in software with Visual Basic for Applications and in web pages with VBScript, and automated tools for the purpose of simplifying this exist. However, web page agents are only compatible with Internet Explorer, since alternative browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox do not support ActiveX. Additionally, users of Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and later or owners of Microsoft Office 2000 and later are the only ones who have the software pre-loaded on their computers; others have to download the software and install it manually.
Microsoft continues to do limited work in the area, offering a free agent developer's kit and character editor on the Microsoft Agent site.The original Clippy was stored as an .ACT file, the same extension as all of Bob's characters. For no good reason, I've found a way to fire Clippy and replace him with any Bob agent in older versions of Microsoft Office programs such as Word 97.To try it, look for an Actors folder inside an Office folder such as Microsoft OfficeOfficeActors). If you have one, drop Rover into it. The dog becomes one of the choices for the office assistant (screenshot).Microsoft Bob 2003/11/20 1 COMMENT Link
One article I thought was interesting is from Digital Humans, What went wrong with clippy the virtual assistant pioneer people loved to hate. It made the additional point that it lacked the ability to create a human emotional connection with users. It was partly not personalized (for example it did not remember your name), and it did not adapt to who you were.
Office 2007 saw the end of these animated characters because of user dissatisfaction but user interface agents are being increasingly being used in software and presentations to enhance interactivity. This is where the free Microsoft Agent Scripting Helper (MASH) comes in.
Bill often had these routines or short skits that he would play out over and over\u2014if you were the target, it was painful the first couple of times then it was for show for other attendees then you had to assert yourself. This was one of those. Through the entire rise and ultimate fall of the idea of an animated character or agent, which he referred to as a \u201Cclown\u201D, this pattern complete with the escalating high-pitched frustrated BillG voice would make an appearance. I lost track of how many times he ridiculed the feature this way. Still, he doesn\u2019t get the right to say told-you-so.
That software equivalent would start with the clown as BillG called it, or Assistant as we called it. The name of the internal implementation of the Assistant, tfc in our Hungarian notation, was a hat tip to BillG\u2019s \u201Cthe f*cking clown.\u201D Even though Bill had ridiculed each social interface product, we were deep in the problem we needed to solve and optimistic we could figure out an approach. We needed to look no further than the computers on Star Trek, which enabled Captain Kirk and Spock to tap into the vast resources with vague questions and open-ended problems. Similarly, the industry was buzzing with the idea of agents that would be able to do work on your behalf such as find cheap airline flights or schedule meetings. Everywhere from Apple to the MIT Media Lab were talking about agents. There was ample evidence this was not simply a weird vision in our corner of the tech world. In fact, by some accounts we were in a race to have the first and best guru in the box.
Want to see more characters or software? Go to our Download Center or check out some of the usermade/uploaded characters in the latest ms-agent-hosting directory or check out some of the other ms-agent-hosting directories linked to the side of the page.
I suggested yesterday that Esurance may have axed Erin because home-made pornographic images of the pink-haired secret agent vastly overwhelmed actual images of the brand icon on the web. But E-Poll data from September 2009, when Erin was alive and well, suggests she ranked poorly even against second-rate icons such as Clippy, the Gorton's Fisherman and Pep Boys' Manny, Moe and Jack.
That being said, unsurprisingly, many technologists working in this area have a basic plan of 1) delivering an abstract service to the end customer using human agents, and 2) collecting data on the interactions to do smart routing / agent matching / super-agent enablement, and 3) possibly progress to some level of AI replacing the agent workforce.
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