I suspect with new AI chatbots we're getting close to the level of tech to be able to remake clippy and make him actually useful this time...
Things like "Hi Clippy, I wrote a draft of this brochure, but can you pad it out and send it out with a customized intro to all promising looking leads in salesforce?"
It's not clippy, but Microsoft has added "suggested styling" to Powerpoint, and I let it re-layout my pages, and the results are beautiful. It sees your page and suggests a layout, which you can choose to accept.
Microsoft has also added "suggested phrasing", which prioritizes concision even when it removes deliberately inserted uncertainty. In some cases, following its suggestions wouldn't even have resulted in coherent sentences. For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.".
> For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.". //
Was your actual sentence "Do $activity, unless $condition is true." (with $activity as say 'print the annual report' and $condition as 'Steve has printed it')? I'm struggling to see how the result wasn't coherent. Something like "Do P&L, unless Wednesday" is terse, but not hard to parse; I must be missing something?
I tried to look back to find the exact example, but couldn't find anywhere that I had written it down. It was something where the $condition was a single word, referring to a boolean variable, but was not itself an adjective. By removing the "is true" clause, the clause was left without a verb, and without an antecedent.
You know what feature I want? The ability to "upgrade" any text that matches some specific set of properties (eg. "Font size > 12, bold") and apply a particular style to it. People create all kinds of horrifying fucked up Word documents with DIY manual formatting, and cleaning it up can be a huge chore.
People don't seem to realize that Word (and LibreOffice Writer) is actually a pretty good document processing and typesetting program, for when you want more features than Markdown/Adoc/rST but you don't need the meticulous precise control of *Tex. But you need to use features like footers, styles, cross-references, etc.
Because they knew that it would be too powerful, too ahead of its time. We all would have wept at the beauty and been unable to continue on in our meagre existences if Bob v2 came into being.
everyone named bob would have felt like shit from there on out knowing there was a bob v2 out there, something they would never be able to attain for themselves.
Am I tripping out or do I remember some demo video of microsoft bob which showed how you could shop for groceries online with it in the mid 90s? I swear I saw this when I was a kid cause it was kind of mind blowing at the time
I never understood the hatred of Clippy. Certainly seems to be from an age where a whimsical touch was allowed in software, nowadays there just seems to be either stern cynicism or forced chuminess in its place.
Then again I was aged below ten when I first played with Office 97.
Imagine Siri/Cortana, but 100x worse, constantly interrupting whatever you are doing. (For what it’s worth, I always disable these assistants the first thing too. But Clippy was worse.)
At least Clippy didn't rely all of your questions back to some server farm somewhere where those questions are used by whomever to build a online profile of you.
The difference is that Clippy was designed to be helpful (and occasionally was), kinda fun to mess around with, only slightly patronizing, could be disabled, could be customized, and generally left the user feeling in control of their own experience and interactions.
Those "cute" wannabe-hip pseudo-hip error messages are the complete opposite. They show up only when you are already annoyed because something is broken, and they make the user feel disrespected. When I see an error message like that, it feels like someone is trying to appease me the way you might try to appease an angry kid with ice cream. They are an insulting attempt to pander to me in order to try to protect me from something I do not need protection from.
I remember the hate well. Clippy was this obnoxious know it all who did shit like lean in and wave his eyebrows at you tapping on the monitor glass condescendingly asking QUESTION after QUESTION when you were trying to do stuff like focusing on writing your dissertation or important TPS reports for the boss. It was so annoying. It even made noises. [1]
I think it was appealing in a cartoony 90's kind of way for maybe 10 minutes for anyone who liked that kind of thing, but if you had to sit down and use this program for hours until you were done this character was the worst. Good thing you could turn it off, I remember a ton of people asking me how to do that back in the day.
If you had shit to do, Clippy was the digital equivalent of some annoying pest of a person throwing out random numbers when you're trying to count cash.
If that's not enough, he specifically creeped women out according to that article:
Generally, Atteberry’s character tested well in focus groups—the best of any assistant in some cases. Yet its massive eyes could be buggy. Some women in the cohorts deemed Clippy a man, and the constant male gaze creepy. “There were comments about how Clippy was leering,” says Roz Ho, who worked in product planning for the PowerPoint team then. When Ho raised that concern, she says the men in the room—everyone else, basically—couldn’t process it. “It really wasn’t about, like, these guys were bad guys, or anything. It was just they had a hard time picturing that feedback.”
Of all the reasons to criticize Clippy, the notion of it evoking a sense of the “constant male gaze” is… something.
Clippy didn’t have a gender, how could something like this possible be avoided? I’m asking with a bit of snark, but I’m genuinely open to a serious answer. I’m worried that the solution would just be an attempt at making the dialogue even more obtuse, or making the avatar overtly feminine.
> how could something like this possible be avoided?
Give up on trying to accommodate everyone.
> making the avatar overtly feminine
In the 90s, I spent plenty of time around the type of person who might see Clippy is a male predator, and they would certainly have had a problem with the assistant being feminine.
As a confident person with bad eye-contact tendencies I must admit I take a bit of personal offense at this, but, based on my opinions about taking offense: no action necessary.
>Timothy: "Don't Bah me! I want to know what you're up to."
>Nero: "This is ridiculous. I like eyes at a level. If you will only blather at me, Mister Goodwin will put you out. If you will take that chair, change your tone, and give me an acceptable reason why I should listen to you, I may listen!"
>Timothy: "I know about you. I know how you operate. If you want to hook Missus Altos for some change, that's her business. But you're not going to drag Miss Hinkley into ..."
>Nero: "Archie, Fritz will open the door."
>Timothy: "Get your hands off me! Get your paws off of me! Awk! Aah!"
To me, Clippy represents designers' obsession with a cloyingly sweet First-Time User Experience that makes the product unusable if you actually retain the user. I think he lives on in "let's make the settings menu a text conversation with a chat bot!," unskippable cut scenes in games, and other overly cute ideas.
I remember being around 12 years old when I had Office as part of my first computer. Oddly, at that age and typing up reports, letters or anything else for school work it was nice to see Clippy right there tell me what he thought of what I was typing up. It was nice for him to teach me what I should do settings wise to get a nice document out of my printer for school. Being that young I wasn't likely to go and read everything about Office just to print out a school report (better off just hand writing it or typing it up on a typewriter). The closest thing I have to Clippy these days is the Doctor in Emacs who fills "tfc" hole I have some days.
And the name is now reused for Rust's package manager cargo's lint tool. I wonder how Rust was able to use the name clippy, I would have thought it were trademarked by Microsoft.
Cargo's clippy started as a third-party tool and got upstreamed later. It's entirely possible that it could be infringing on some trademark, but in that case it wouldn't be that much trouble to change it to "cargo vet" or something.
Had the privilege of attending a talk given by one of the MS researchers behind Clippy. They were using some very sophisticated ML behind the scenes (Bayes Nets) to interpret intent and guide troubleshooting. The magic of that often goes unappreciated with all of the vitriol / hype around the character.
Here's Eric Horvitz's page on Lumiere, the research project underlying Clippy - http://erichorvitz.com/lum.htm. It's quite sad that the business side hobbled the assistant to the point of making it annoying, mainly because of space reasons (that was also when Office got its first spell check, and the extra space needed for the the more sophisticated assistant modeling was competing for that space).
What was Microsoft thinking with this? They realized, or should have realized BOB was a bad idea, we weren't that dumb.
But then Clippy? So that when hardware was 10,000 times better, and software that much more refined, there would be a literal strongman/person who would emerge from your device and force you this direction or that?
At some point I found the clippy & friends spritesheets online and was trying to add it to blender, unfortunately (or fortunately) you couldn’t do UI animations without moving the mouse (or other trickery) so it ended up as a “it woulda been awesome” project. Not to mention the copyright issues.
I do think the hate is overblown and a little immature. Maybe it felt a little silly if you were already a computer expert in 1995, or just hated Microsoft in general as was en vogue at the time, but the character served an important purpose. The Microsoft Office suite was huge, could be overwhelming, and still came with 20 pounds of printed manuals. Was the average user ever likely to discover the Letter Wizard or the Party Invitation Template? Clippy did do some analysis of the document you were typing and make some helpful suggestions to guide a new user around the program. And you could turn it off.
Personally I will go to bat for Clippy and don’t think he deserves the derision.
> I do think the hate is overblown and a little immature.
It was one of the first examples of computer getting in your way and interfeering with your work. It was like your boss comming every 10 minutes with: " Are you ok ? Can i help you ?
The first thing i did when installing office was turn office assistant off.
Personally, is it immature to dump on clippy? Probably. But after the 10,000 time of that darn thing popping up and asking you a pointless question.. Yes, it gets annoying. I already know what I want to do, why are you harassing me? Did I ask for help? Then no, you're just getting in the way of my job.
The web would be a much nicer place if instead of random popups Clippy pops up with “I noticed you bought a car recently? Here’s a 2020 Datsun you might like…”
Microsoft should license Clippy to all the adtech giants.
I think those who fail to appreciate clippy, fail to appreciate that there is nothing like face to face collaboration. The natural interactions instead of relying on impersonal email/slack, the genuine curiosity to pop-up anytime without having to deal with location/timezone issues, the water-cooler-chat type spontaneity to find out "what are you trying to do" - these are essential towards achieving continuous improvement and productivity growth. That is why I think we should support clippy and return to office.
I remember fooling around with the Microsoft Assistant APIs of that era — there were a number of downloadable characters you could have on your desktop, and you could script various animations, gestures, prompts and tie it in to your programs.
It's shame those APIs are now retired and are no longer part of Windows, as having those assistants as front ends to proper ML/AI systems would be a fun coding experiment.
i found it to be a mildly funny and innovative idea but also not very helpful and hence deactivated it after a few days. i also agree that the hatred always seemed rather self serving and overtly emotional.
I couldn't stand Clippy. The sounds it made were obnoxious. But I switched to PowerPup and actually enjoyed having him there. His animations were cute.
>Fries and Linnett would test scores of similar characters as “wizards” for Bob. They’d do so with the help of two star Stanford researchers. Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves were an odd couple—Nass a computing savant liable to have a chunk of cream cheese on his tie, Reeves a polished film and TV buff—but they were of the same mind about media: People’s interactions with screens were “social and natural”—as if the machines were humans. During a two-year leave from Palo Alto, they visited Redmond almost weekly as consultants with Microsoft’s internal think tank.
I posted this recently about Cliff Nass and Clippy on the discussion about Bonzi Buddy:
DonHopkins on June 5, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bonzi Buddy
Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Bob and Clippy were all based on a tragic misinterpretation of the theories of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, and as much as those Microsoft products were mismanaged, mocked, maligned, and abused, his theories and work were actually quite interesting and still relevant, though tragically misunderstood. I saw him give a fascinating talk about his work at Ted Selker's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop at IBM Almaden Labs in 1996.
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they'...
79 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadThings like "Hi Clippy, I wrote a draft of this brochure, but can you pad it out and send it out with a customized intro to all promising looking leads in salesforce?"
It's explained badly here, but it works well:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-profession...
I think there is room for a good "AI" companion that runs when you're in Word, or Powerpoint. (Maybe not Excel.)
Was your actual sentence "Do $activity, unless $condition is true." (with $activity as say 'print the annual report' and $condition as 'Steve has printed it')? I'm struggling to see how the result wasn't coherent. Something like "Do P&L, unless Wednesday" is terse, but not hard to parse; I must be missing something?
People don't seem to realize that Word (and LibreOffice Writer) is actually a pretty good document processing and typesetting program, for when you want more features than Markdown/Adoc/rST but you don't need the meticulous precise control of *Tex. But you need to use features like footers, styles, cross-references, etc.
Then again I was aged below ten when I first played with Office 97.
But it’s also generally useless.
Imagine Siri/Cortana, but 100x worse, constantly interrupting whatever you are doing. (For what it’s worth, I always disable these assistants the first thing too. But Clippy was worse.)
Those "cute" wannabe-hip pseudo-hip error messages are the complete opposite. They show up only when you are already annoyed because something is broken, and they make the user feel disrespected. When I see an error message like that, it feels like someone is trying to appease me the way you might try to appease an angry kid with ice cream. They are an insulting attempt to pander to me in order to try to protect me from something I do not need protection from.
Insincere and in a "How do you do, fellow kids" kind of way
While I thought it was cute saw no reason for it to exist as the Win2k input panel was the same, probably with a spinner.
I think it was appealing in a cartoony 90's kind of way for maybe 10 minutes for anyone who liked that kind of thing, but if you had to sit down and use this program for hours until you were done this character was the worst. Good thing you could turn it off, I remember a ton of people asking me how to do that back in the day.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A
If that's not enough, he specifically creeped women out according to that article:
Generally, Atteberry’s character tested well in focus groups—the best of any assistant in some cases. Yet its massive eyes could be buggy. Some women in the cohorts deemed Clippy a man, and the constant male gaze creepy. “There were comments about how Clippy was leering,” says Roz Ho, who worked in product planning for the PowerPoint team then. When Ho raised that concern, she says the men in the room—everyone else, basically—couldn’t process it. “It really wasn’t about, like, these guys were bad guys, or anything. It was just they had a hard time picturing that feedback.”
Clippy didn’t have a gender, how could something like this possible be avoided? I’m asking with a bit of snark, but I’m genuinely open to a serious answer. I’m worried that the solution would just be an attempt at making the dialogue even more obtuse, or making the avatar overtly feminine.
Give up on trying to accommodate everyone.
> making the avatar overtly feminine
In the 90s, I spent plenty of time around the type of person who might see Clippy is a male predator, and they would certainly have had a problem with the assistant being feminine.
https://youtube.com/shorts/se33Fv_sEEA
This guy gets it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfJJk7i0NTk
>Jim: "Remember you told me to tell you when you're acting rudely and insensitively? Remember that? You're doing it right now."
The way Nero Wolfe (also played by Maury Chaykin) reacted to Timothy Quayle (played by Robert Bockstael) reminds me of how people reacted to Clippy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HszQwf_76w
>Nero: "Bah!"
>Timothy: "Don't Bah me! I want to know what you're up to."
>Nero: "This is ridiculous. I like eyes at a level. If you will only blather at me, Mister Goodwin will put you out. If you will take that chair, change your tone, and give me an acceptable reason why I should listen to you, I may listen!"
>Timothy: "I know about you. I know how you operate. If you want to hook Missus Altos for some change, that's her business. But you're not going to drag Miss Hinkley into ..."
>Nero: "Archie, Fritz will open the door."
>Timothy: "Get your hands off me! Get your paws off of me! Awk! Aah!"
But then Clippy? So that when hardware was 10,000 times better, and software that much more refined, there would be a literal strongman/person who would emerge from your device and force you this direction or that?
[0] https://www.smore.com/clippy-js
Personally I will go to bat for Clippy and don’t think he deserves the derision.
I hope they bring back the paperclip avatar too one day.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
I distinctly recall it repeatedly turning itself back on.
It was one of the first examples of computer getting in your way and interfeering with your work. It was like your boss comming every 10 minutes with: " Are you ok ? Can i help you ? The first thing i did when installing office was turn office assistant off.
yes, it was.
Microsoft should license Clippy to all the adtech giants.
Personally I loved the Wizard avatar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpWbTogEEhg
I posted this recently about Cliff Nass and Clippy on the discussion about Bonzi Buddy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27403536
DonHopkins on June 5, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bonzi Buddy
Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Bob and Clippy were all based on a tragic misinterpretation of the theories of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, and as much as those Microsoft products were mismanaged, mocked, maligned, and abused, his theories and work were actually quite interesting and still relevant, though tragically misunderstood. I saw him give a fascinating talk about his work at Ted Selker's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop at IBM Almaden Labs in 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Nass
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
https://archive.org/details/g4tv.com-video4080
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they'...