The World According to Mitch

If you have been using Microsoft Office as long as I have then you remember Clippy, the personal assistant who never seemed to do anything useful. It is what was left of Microsoft Bob when Windows 95 made that tool obsolete, and was included in every version of Microsoft Office from 1997 through 2007. The scuttlebutt was that the idea for it came from Melinda Gates (then Melinda French), which is why it lasted so long. French was, of course, a PM on the Microsoft Bob team, so this is not implausible.

There were several options to change Clippy to someone else. If you preferred to get your completely useless help suggestions from a dog, cat, bouncing ball, or even William Shakespeare, there were options for those. Despite all that, it is Clippy that has gone down in the annals of computer history as the ridiculous if harmless failure that Microsoft included in its software. For those of you who do not remember these good old days it is difficult to conceive that something so small could take up valuable resources, but when our computers were limited to 3.25gb of RAM (and who even had that?) it was relevant.

There has been Clippy nostalgia in the sixteen years since his retirement. A friend was once so excited to discover that there was a Clippy costume in Redmond, and went out of his way to track it down and get permission to don said costume on a number of occasions. One can only hope, knowing that Sean was not so cute as the real thing, that he would at least have been at least slightly more helpful.

On Canada Day 2023 I was sitting with a friend who told me that someone had decided to reawaken Clippy with a ChatGPT backend. He sent me a link to the article he had read and I checked it out. It seems that indeed a company called FireCube took the nostalgia of Clippy (which was used by hardly anyone) and brought it to our Windows 11 desktops.

In order to use Clippy by FireCube you need to have an account with OpenAI.com, and then create an API Key (there is no cost to any of this). You generate the key and then import it into your Clippy by FireCube settings. Clippy will tell you this as soon as he (she? It? They?)appears. While the instructions currently say that you then need to refresh Clippy’s dialogue, in the current iteration (version 0.1 Preview) I did not see any way to do this, so I closed and then relaunched the app, which worked just fine.

As of this writing Clippy has no optional alternate personalities, but one can only assume they are in the pipeline. Right-clicking the taskbar icon brings up a menu with six settings, along with two ways to contact the developers. It is an open source app so if you are a coder wanting to contribute to the development then there are ways to do that.

I do not know what the future holds for Clippy but I do know that Microsoft recently announced Windows Copilot which will be their own proprietary personal assistant with the same ChatGPT backend. Copilot will be included in the Windows 11 23H2 this fall, and is currently in preview with Microsoft Insider builds. I know that people are going wild over ChatGPT and how artificial intelligence is helping us to work more productively… or at least give the appearance that we are working while AI does most of the heavy lifting for us. I am sure that many Windows users will be thrilled with this new feature; whether they would want old-school Clippy (who might just be a grandfather to a warren of staples by now) staring at them with those googly eyes.

Billy Joel sang that ‘…The good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.’ The same friend and I were discussing doing a podcast about what technology twenty or even forty years ago was like. I love the idea of talking about it, but when I thought about booting up an old 80486 PC (or Apple //e… or Atari 400) and trying to demonstrate it my excitement started to wane. There are reasons that some technologies evolved while others faded into oblivion. I installed the new Clippy by FireCube as a laugh, but I doubt that he/she/it/they will get much use, and will likely not be reinstalled the next time I refresh my OS. But then again, I might fall completely in love with it and decide I cannot live without it! Unlikely… but stranger things have happened.