Here's a demo of Lumiere, the research prototype that inspired Clippy (the Office Assistant): youtube.com/watch?v=9fVS_IWN… As background: The shipped version operated quite differently. The Office team decided to execute the Bayesian inference component only when there was a user-initiated search. So there was no autonomous initiative for the Bayesian component. So where did the infamous Clippy behaviors come from? The activations that folks noted and joked about were based in a separate, legacy system that was hooked up to Clippy--relatively simplistic rule-based tips that were a holdover from the "Tip Wizard" system that had been used in earlier versions of Office, where the rules gently lit up a lightbulb icon on a toolbar. So, there were actually two minds behind Clippy--one Bayesian and only executing when a question was asked, and the other a legacy rule-based system designed originally for a quieter bell icon.

Short video on the power & promise of federally funded, curiosity-driven research by the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery. Accompanies the special issue. vimeo.com/1138681990 @CACMmag @TheOfficialACM @MSFTResearch