Remember the Paperclip assistant in the old Microsoft office? It may have been a pain-in-the-arse for you or have actually been helpful. But have you notice how weird is a paperclip with eyes and eyebrows and zipping around your screen, without legs?

And here’s a list of the Microsoft Patents on Animated Character which was supposedly destined for your screen, but many didn’t make the cut. Well, lucky us, as many of them are rather crazy ideas.

14. Software Platform Having a Real World Interface With Animated Characters
Filed July 8th, 1994


Microsoft’s fascination with the idea of animated characters as software helpers first evidenced itself in Microsoft Bob, the legendary, legendarily bad front-end for Windows 3.1. That dog is Rover, the cursed canine who lived on to serve as the “Search Assistant” in Windows XP. (An article on Microsoft’s own site published when Windows XP was released says that some people “loathe” Rover–can you name another instance of any company anywhere using that word in conjunction with customer response to a new product?) One enduring mystery about this patent: Why did Microsoft call a program involving a talking mutt a “real world interface?”?

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13. Video and Radio Controlled Moving and Talking Device
Filed September 28th, 1995


This image is slightly off-topic–it’s for the invention that reached the market as Actimates, a line of robotic animated dolls that interacted with content on VHS videotapes. But the pissed-off expression on those bears’ faces is irresistible, and I think that Actimates were another expression of whatever primal urge motivated Microsoft to create Bob and Clippy. Microsoft never sold Actimates teddy bears–instead, it opted for the smiling-but-evil Barney and Teletubbies.

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12. Use of Avatars With Automated Gesturing and Bounded Interaction in an On-Line Chat Session
Filed December 14th, 1995

Here’s a patent for an early chat system involving animated characters–a sort of mid-1990s Second Life. (I’m not sure if Microsoft ever released anything based on this.) It’s not often that you see a smiley face with a torso.

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11. Intelligent User Assistance Facility
Filed July 19th, 1996

Call this the Clippy patent–the one that’s specifically about the infamous Office Assistant introduced in Office 97. For most of us, the Office Assistant is synonymous with the talking paperclip character, but you could actually choose between multiple helpers. Including William Shakespeare or an unreasonable facsimile thereof (shown in a fuzzy patent drawing). “Will” is offering to help the user perform regression analysis here–I would have thought it intuitively obvious that anyone who knows what regression analysis is probably doesn’t want an animated version of the Bard of Avon getting involved in the process.

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10. System and Method for Substituting an Animated Character When a Remote Control Physical Character is Unavailable
Filed February 4th, 1997

Here’s another Actimates-related drawing–still a little off-topic, and also too irresistibly odd not to publish here. The kid is bald and may only have one arm and one leg (or is he a merboy?), and his Actimate figure is at least as large as he is. Creepy.

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9. Modulating the Behavior of an Animated Character to Reflect Beliefs Inferred About a User’s Desire for Automated Services
Filed May 17th, 1997

The best whacko patents have wonderfully deadpan names; this one is an excellent example. There’s something vaguely spiritual about it. I’m not sure if it ever led to a shipping product; I sure don’t remember a little birdie notifying me about new e-mail or reminding me about appointments.

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8. Client Server Animation System for Managing Interactive User Interface Characters
Filed May 19th, 1997


As far as I know, Microsoft thought better about the notion of giving Windows a magical genie assistant. He showed up in Internet Explorer voice-synthesis demos.

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7. Software Platform Having a Real World Interface With Animated Characters
Filed June 19th, 1997

This is a remnant of the Microsoft Bob interface, in a patent filed a couple of years after Bob had been laughed off the market. Those that do not remember software mistakes, it seems, are condemned to repeat them.

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6. Method for Managing Simultaneous Display of Multiple Windows in a Graphical User Interface
Filed July 15th, 1997


Here’s Clippy himself–who was, by the way, officially known as “Clippit”–in a drawing from a patent relating to Office’s need to wrangle the main application window and the smaller one that the Office Assistant lived in. (Later versions of the Assistant sat right on top of your documents.) Read the whole patent, and you’ll see that Microsoft put immense effort into the technical logistics of implementing Clippy. He wasn’t the spawn of a moment of temporary insanity; he was the result of a vast amount of cold, calculating effort.

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5. Intelligent User Assistance Facility
Filed November 20th, 1998

Here’s that birdy again, in a variant of the earlier Shakespeare/regression analysis drawing. The thing you have to remember about patent drawings is that the fact that Microsoft showed a childlike drawing of a plump chickadee providing advice on advanced number-crunching doesn’t mean that it ever intended to use that particular character providing that specific advice in a real product. But let’s make fun of the idea anyhow, OK?

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4. System for Improving Search Text
Filed December 23rd, 1998

Meet Earl, a surfer dude (get it?) who’s mostly a giant pair of lips and who seems to think he knows more about the Internet than you do. (Once again, I don’t know if Microsoft unleashed this exact idea on its customers, but it’s a variant of the Search Assistant from Windows XP.) Two scary things about this patent: 1) its title pitches it as a search improvement rather than a perverse joke; and B) this is apparently what Microsoft was doing to enhance Web search at the same time that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were founding Google.

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3. Method for Generating Comic Panels
Filed April 28th, 2000


Am I allowed to throw in a drawing for a product I actually liked? This one relates to Comic Chat, an Internet chat client that I sort of enjoyed at the time. Its brief life would, however, seem to indicate that I didn’t have all that much company.

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2. Conversational Interface Agent
Filed March 14th, 2002

The text of this relatively recent patent maintains that the problem with animated assistants up until that time was that they were too cartoony, and more realistic humans would work better. That’s a slap in the face to every anthropomorphic office supply, domestic animal, woodland creature, and deceased playwright that Microsoft had called into service to help its users up into that point. And almost seven years later, I haven’t seen ordinary-person assistants catching on in Microsoft products or anywhere else.

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1. Computer Interface for Illiterate and Near-Illiterate Users
Filed January 25th, 2006

This patent (which was filed less than three years ago) pitches on-screen assistants as an interface for people who can’t read or write. The garb of the lady shown here is explained by the fact that the patent is the result of work by researchers in India; the parent says that the assistant could also be a dog, an elephant, or an airplane. It’s scary to think that the idea behind Bob and Clippy hasn’t completely fizzled out, but look on the bright side–if you’re reading this story, Microsoft isn’t going to try and get you to use any product based on this patent.

[from Technologizer]