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While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XP’s installation process. The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a user’s behalf. 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. Agent 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).

It didn’t exactly work.Ĭlippy was built on a technology called Microsoft Agent. In Microsoft’s collective mind, this meant they should start putting faces and voices on their screens, so people would enjoy using their computer more. Microsoft designed this assistant feature after “tragically misunderstanding” a Stanford University study that observed humans emotionally respond to computers the same way they respond to people.

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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.

To answer that question, we have to go back to find another familiar face from the past: Clippy. As 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.

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