![]() While speech synthesizers existed well before that, most people didn't have a user-friendly way to play with them. This is also how many young people learned not to download things just because they're free.īonzi's speech engine (part of the Microsoft Agent suite), was a huge novelty around the time it was released in 1999. BonziBuddy was free, so there seemed to be no harm in downloading it. This meant that anyone from eight year olds to their grandmothers could download the "cute purple monkey" and play with it just for fun. Third-party developer BONZI Software used Peedy as the first version of its standalone helper program "BonziBUDDY." Microsoft had intended these assistants to be bundled with other programs, but Bonzi's assistant was designed to help with everything. It would sit on your desktop all the time, talk to you every once in a while, and you could ask it to do things like.well, frankly, it wasn't that useful, but it sure was fun to hear it talk.īonziBuddy may have essentially been a worse version of Clippy, but it had one thing going for it that Clippy didn't have: It wasn't tied to office software. While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XP's installation process. ![]() The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a user's behalf. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the Wizard, Robby the Robot, Genie the Genie, and Peedy the Parrot. Agent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in Microsoft Bob (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes). Clippy was built on a technology called Microsoft Agent.
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