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, gi

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.