
Five Lessons from Clippy's Failure - nahuakang
https://medium.com/twentybn/5-lessons-from-clippys-failure-efc69297eac1
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smush
Yay, an F5bot alert on Clippy that actually is about the MS Office character!

I wish the MS Agent technology was still around. You could create a character,
give it some animations, then feed it to, say, MASH, the Microsoft Agent
Scripting Helper, and it would render the character on screen.

I once used it in middle school to give a short survey, where Merlin asked 5
questions about class or somesuch while 'writing the answers down'.

One of the big deals with these agents is that MS Office didn't DO anything
with them. They had all of these animations and capabilities but unless you
followed a rigid process (open new doc, type Dear, press enter), it would not
trigger any agent reactions.

If it were easy to create a macro involving the agents to start a survey or
'agent-hosted guided wizard', the feature might have been more used in the LOB
applications of the day.

Then again, easily defining actions or surveys is the main thing that stops
current AI voice assistants from being more useful than, say, an internet
connected Dragon Dictate with predefined scripts.

Hopefully Almond and Snips fix the latter problem long term.

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nahuakang
Well, it's time we pay Clippy some proper attention, but probably more to
learn from his failed career so that we can build better products!

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PeterCorless
There should never have been a Clippy.

