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No, it wasn’t any more revolutionary in the 90s than it sounds now, but it was mildly successful for the company. This app let you record audio and attach a picture to email.

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These included Bonzi Software’s original software hit, a voice email app.

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Bonzi was a showman and he would not be upstaged by your spreadsheets.īonziBuddy would also promote Bonzi Software’s other programs, often using deceptive popups that looked like official Windows alerts. Bonzi also has had a nasty habit of randomly swinging on a green vine from one side of your computer to another, which got in the way of whatever you were doing. Ultimately, BonziBuddy was more useful as a toy than a real productivity program. That…was about it. You could open a box to enter a search term or web site address and Bonzi would pass it off to your browser, but that’s even more complicated than just opening your browser directly. You could use the built-in calendar to keep track of your events. You could sync your POP3 email so Bonzi could read off your messages to you. Knows how much fun you can have with an early speech synthesizer you control.īeyond the novelty, Bonzi claimed to offer more practical features. You could also make Bonzi say whatever you wanted with it’s text-to-speech feature. Bonzi would occasionally speak up to share a lame joke or sing a song in a nauseatingly robotic voice, but he talked funny. , most people didn’t have a user-friendly way to play with them. Speech synthesizers existed well before that

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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. Looking back, sure it didn’t make much sense to create a purple ape assistant from whole cloth, but perhaps Bonzi’s biggest sin (so far in the story, anyway), was reskinning Microsoft’s bad decisions.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 any developer could include Peedy in their programs, only Bonzi had their trademark monkey. The company created their own cartoon character that was somehow sillier than a talking green parrot: a talking purple monkey. 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 toĪfter a couple iterations of the program, Bonzi decided that they didn’t want to just use the generic character that anyone could use. While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. 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: (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes).

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Agent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in In Microsoft’s collective mind, this meant they should start putting faces and voices on their screens, so people would enjoy using their computer more. That observed humans emotionally respond to computers the same way they respond to people.

“tragically misunderstanding” a Stanford University study Microsoft designed this assistant feature after

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The default skin for Office Assistant was Clippit (commonly shortened to Clippy), a paper clip with googly eyes and a penchant for bothering you as soon as you started working on a document. As part of the Office 97 release, Microsoft introduced Office Assistant, an animated character that would pop up to help you do things as you worked. To answer that question, we have to go back to find another familiar face from the past: That much at least makes some sense to us now, but who in their right mind would think that you’d want a Alexa, Siri, Google, and even Cortana are household names, and we just sort of accepted the idea that a disembodied, vaguely human-sounding voice can help us do routine tasks. In today’s world, virtual assistants seem normal.