I loved clippy, and found it super helpful. Granted, I was a child and fascinated with the idea of artificial intelligence, which clippy was the closest thing to at that point in time. It was a useful tool, and it's at times irrelevant suggestions got me exploring things I would never have learned through school or casual exposure. All in all it was a fun, quirky, at times useful and all around great tool, just not for the target audience.

Clippy was some two decades ahead of its time. If they took the same design, but implemented it via GPT-4, the result would not only be genuinely useful, but likely superior to O365 Copilot - floating ambient-aware agent beats a chat sidebar.

Clippy, if activated, always added an unnecessary step in accessing the help file. Clippy was in part bad, because the help file had a mostly useless index, leading to no or wrong answers for Clippy. The content in the help file was additionally less than accurate, it lacked usage examples and a FAQ section that could have been used for recognizing and offering a solution to a question.

The difficult part of creating an assistant is recognizing the users' problems and offering solutions. It's the kind of experience a company can acquire with years of tech support or lots of lab testing. Then it would have to compile that knowledge in an expert system and give it away essentiality for free.

Companies that prioritize development and/or support over documentation shouldn't try to create an assistant for the same reasons. But if you have great documentation, a great support knowledgebase, and support scripts, creating an assistant out of it will someday become as easy as keeping a Juypter notebook running.

if [[ $input == dear* ]]; then

  echo "It looks like you're writing a letter"

I was expecting it to be an annoyance program that ran in the background and gave unhelpful suggestions.

Instead, I'm trying to figure out if I can use this at work.

Someone out there loved Clippy so much, they wrote erotic fiction about it. Warning: Mindly NSFW. I'll see myself out...

https://www.amazon.com/Conquered-Clippy-Erotic-Digital-Desir...

> Did we all forget that everyone hated Clippy?

no. you didn't get the joke.

Wasn't the output of ffmpeg being more cryptic than the obvious ".mp4" extension a dead give away to you?

If clippy was actually useful people probably wouldn’t have hated it as much