Might Microsoft Be Gearing Up to 'Clippy' the Consumer Copilot?
As we approach the one year anniversary of the (curious) deal – the first "hackquisition"! – that brought the Inflection team to Microsoft, Harry McCracken looks at the work Mustafa Suleyman has been tasked with inside of the tech titan, leading their consumer AI efforts. I'm quoted briefly in the piece noting my viewpoint that Microsoft hasn't had much success to date in the space compared to their peers – and awkwardly, certainly their partner, OpenAI.
Overall, it reads like a fair take on the situation and gives some vision into Microsoft's own reaction to the DeepSeek moment (beyond Satya Nadella's "Jevons paradox" take, which became a meme). And the "race", obviously, is still in its early days. But near the end is a particularly interesting nugget:
Once again, Suleyman’s rarified description of his aims is running ahead of anything MAI has actually shipped. But some of his aspiration to engage on an emotional level was visible in a blobby, smiling onscreen animated character I glimpsed at MAI’s off-site meeting—an early, unannounced manifestation of what Copilot would look like if you could see it as well as chat with it. The character’s cartoony vibe also happens to scratch an itch Microsoft has had since at least 1992.
That’s when the company became smitten with research by Stanford professors Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, which showed that people attribute human qualities to computers and other forms of media. Taking their conclusions as an argument for making software interfaces more anthropomorphic, Microsoft released a quirky Windows add-on called Microsoft Bob. After that flopped, the company doubled down with Office 97’s Office Assistants, including that iconic pest Clippy.
When it turned out Office users didn’t actually want productivity aid from cartoon characters, Microsoft deemphasized Clippy and company—and eventually removed them altogether. More recently, it has good-naturedly embraced the talking paper clip as a totem of failure. If consumers really do find an animated version of Copilot to be irresistible, Clippy can feel free to have a long-delayed last laugh.
You simply cannot have an article about Microsoft and AI and not mention Clippy. I'm sorry, it's in the contract. But really, it's perhaps apt here given what McCracken spotted on that screen. Might we be getting some kind of Microsoft consumer Copilot character? While others have tried versions of this, one of the flagship, cutting-edge LLM vocal computing plays doing this could be interesting. Right now, ChatGPT's voice mode is an amorphous dot (even when in Santa mode). Gemini's is some colors at the bottom of the screen. Meta has tried to put celebrities in your field of view, but that was stupid, and quickly axed.1 Alexa and Siri remain just voices from beyond. Might there be a play here?
At some point, as this technology moves into the real world and slowly morphs into robots, we undoubtedly will get some form of this anthropomorphized evolution. And yes, Microsoft has been aiming to do some form of this forever. As one of the (seemingly few) users of Microsoft Bob back in the day, I appreciate this. And let's not forget – let's never forget – Apple's Knowledge Navigator. The 1987 concept video featured AI in the form of a bow-tied butler agent.
One more thing: Perhaps one idea for a character could be a "glib owl" – the way McCracken describes Suleyman at one point.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Only to be resurrected, without the bodies at least this time.