![]() ![]() Automated assistants are a black box into which you place a request, and a response comes out the other end. The Assistant feature was meant to function, well, like an assistant: You could ask it to do something, and then it would perform the task … somehow. If you started a document with “Dear So-and-so,” Clippy figured out that you were writing a letter, and tried to offer help. Bob’s son, Clippy, had been born.Ĭlippy was ostensibly designed to make writing easier. In doing so, they released a metallic menace upon the world. In November of the next year, Microsoft released the latest version of its suite of applications, Office 97. ![]() But the underlying tech, like the “Microsoft Actor” file format, was updated and repurposed for a new project. Each of these dozen characters, moreover, has a distinct and often obtrusive personality Bob users interact with their PCs by communicating with a psychotic MTV rat, a coffee-drinking lizard, a submissive rabbit, a hostile parrot, and other oddly-behaved creatures.Īs a program, Microsoft Bob was a notorious flop, and little-known. As one edition of Soft-Letter put it at the time: In fact, virtually all interaction with the program takes place through these “friends of Bob,” who constantly move around the screen, making suggestions, juggling objects, and otherwise displaying symptoms of pseudo-spontaneous behavior. Guiding you through the house was a cartoon character that offered help and advice.īob was unveiled in 1995. Instead of using office metaphors for computer functions (folders, files, recycle bin), Bob arranged things in different rooms of a virtual house. The personal computer, still trying to shake off the assumption that it was a tool for writing office memos and playing games, was not quite mainstream yetĪmid this environment, Microsoft tried to create a friendlier, approachable operating system - a debacle known as Microsoft Bob. In the mid-’90s, Microsoft was exploring how to make personal computing more approachable to consumers who might never encounter a PC in an enterprise environment. Eventually, the idea goes, you can hold full conversations with an AI chat bot, asking it to answer complex questions and undertake complicated tasks.īut nearly two decades ago, our current era of AI overload started with two simple sentences. Granted, a child with a relatively limited vocabulary and set of skills, but technically, that counts. The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were a person. You’ll hear people with titles like “chief experience officer” and “thinkfluence concierge” talk about “neural networks” and “machine learning” and “natural language processing.” Alexa, Siri, Cortana … the Google Assistant? The new emoji will land in Teams and Windows “this holiday season” and will roll out to other services “throughout 2022.There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence. You can read more about Microsoft’s design process in this Medium post. There are even some new work-from-home inspired emoji, because coronavirus and all. It’s not clear where these animations will show up, but it’s a nice little touch. ![]() Like many Fluent design elements, the emoji are comprised of multiple 3D elements, which also helped Microsoft animate almost all of the new emoji. Android’s old blobs might still be objectively the best shape for emoji, but I like what Microsoft is going for here. A video speaks a million words, or whatever that expression is: The changes boil down to “the old emojis were flat, the new ones are 3D.” But the characters as a whole have been redesigned to offer the kind of semi-translucent acrylic vibe of the Fluent design language. Microsoft is showing off the new characters early in honor of World Emoji Day, a thing that exists. While there was nothing terribly wrong with the old emoji, they featured a flat design and bold outlines that were at odds with both Microsoft’s Fluent design language and the more bubbly emoji of many other platforms. ![]()
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