Office Guardian Angel Worse Than Clippy 118
ZWilder writes "Remember 'Clippy', the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and 'turned the dial up to 11' with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as 'Guardian Angel.' Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is 'an intelligent personalized agent' that 'monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user.' Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from '2001: A Space Oddysey.'"
How ironic (Score:2, Informative)
Re:April 1 (Score:3, Informative)
For assisting the elderly/memory impaired... (Score:3, Informative)
These types of technologies have been under development in many companies for several years to enable elderly people to live independently for longer (hence the pill reminder example in the article).
They are part of the so called "Ubiquitous Computing" movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
This is not intended to be an add-on for MS-Word.
Re:Obviously this is... (Score:5, Informative)
OpenOffice Help Agent (Score:3, Informative)
It's Apple's "Knowledge Navigator!" (Score:4, Informative)
How quickly we forget. John Sculley was showing demoware of the Knowledge Navigator [wikipedia.org] all over the place in the late 1980s.
Here's a picture of it, bowtie and all. [gottabemobile.com]
It has gone to whatever Valhalla OpenDoc, Cyberdog, and QuickDraw GX dwell in.