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Office Guardian Angel Worse Than Clippy
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.'"
(User browsing some good porn.)
Guardian Angel: "It looks like you're breaking some commandments!"
Well, I guess it is April 1 already in some parts of the world. Sigh. Time to turn the computer off for a day.
My SIG is a P220.
Slashdot: The only place where 4 year old patents are news!
It had some good AI actually built into it to understand my questions. I think they actually unified two branches of AI to create it.
This isn't "Clippy 2.0". This is applied AI research that's more than ten years from making it into any real product, and it's a field a lot of companies are researching. From what I've read so far it's really far too vague and generic for anyone to deserve a patent on it, but the patent will probably expire before Microsoft has the opportunity to sue anyone over it.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Please don't pull my wings off, Dave!
by Xpendable (1605485) on Thursday April 01, @08:29AM
I wouldn't call it early.
Good lord, I hope this isn't an April Fool's joke. For years I've been waiting for Microsoft to take more control over my life. When the Great Decision Engine Bing first arrived on the scene, I hoped the glorious day had finally arrived, only to have my hopes dashed when I found that Bing will only 'suggest'. PLEASE, Microsoft, save me from myself!
Maybe somebody @ MS is a Bernhard Goetz [wikipedia.org] kind of a guy.
I'm not clicking on that link. I know slashdot claims it goes to wikipedia, but I still fear it's all just going to end with more distended anuses.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I don't think Microsoft goes so far with its April Fool's jokes as to file an actual patent application.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Why not? The current patent system reminds me of one big April fools joke.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How quickly we forget. John Sculley was showing demoware of the Knowledge Navigator all over the place in the late 1980s.
Here's a picture of it, bowtie and all.
It has gone to whatever Valhalla OpenDoc, Cyberdog, and QuickDraw GX dwell in.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
offtopic i know:
At first glance it looked like Microsoft didn’t have an april fools joke on their website today...
But then I saw this:
Internet Explorer 8 - faster, safer and easier than ever
Well done Microsoft. You got me.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
We tend to find animated "helpers" annoying. Please stop.
Yours,
People
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Information: You are all going to die.
Bow-ties are cool.