Building a Better Bob

During this time, I set out to try to fix some of Bob’s implementation issues. First, I would create an interface that was not proprietary such as Bob and Office 97 had done, but available for any developer to incorporate in a Windows application or Web page. As a part of that I would include tools that enable developers to create their own characters.

I also set out to make the character able to more closely integrate with an application (or Web page) by displaying each frame of animation in a window shaped to the character’s frame. In essence this enabled the character to be manipulated like “sprites” in video games, able to move around the interface without the underlying application having to repaint the screen when the character’s animation window moved. This now allowed the character to point to virtually any element of an application’s interface.

I then added an option for speech input and synthetic speech output (text-to-speech). Microsoft’s own speech recognition could be used as well as those from IBM, AT&T, and others. I also licensed a number of text-to-speech engines that developers could distribute as the voices of the characters. Finally, I had an animator create four characters including Robby (a robot), Peedy (a cracker-eating parrot that had originally been created by Microsoft researchers), Merlin (a short bearded magician), and Genie (a blue genie). I dubbed the product Microsoft Agent, and posted it to the Web for free download. My goal was to create a technology that would enable any developer to incorporate it.

The Office team picked up Microsoft Agent for their next release, but opted not to use the characters I had created as they preferred their own unique ones. To avoid the past user-reported annoyances, they gave users more control over when the character would appear, but did little to reform its behavior when it was present. So, you still had the same cognitive disconnect between the character’s reaction to your actions in the application’s primary interface. The character just became a sugar coating for the Help interface, which, if it failed to come up with useful results, left the user unimpressed and thinking that the character was not very useful.

Similarly, the Windows team picked up my Agent code for the search interface and the user assistance in the registration user interface. It was really only in this latter usage that the technology started to approach what I had intended. Here the character only appeared when summoned and was actually implemented to offer help contextually. So if the user had a question about a particular field or form or had not completed some required information, the character would move and point to that location and say something helpful (e.g. “you need to enter your zip code”). In addition, the interface had progressive assistance, so if you repeated an error or asked for help on the same thing, it would provide more expansive assistance.

I had also tried to add more substantial “intelligence” to the interface that would better interpret intent from a query a user would type in using techniques like natural language processing techniques such as semantic and syntactical analysis. But alas, it was too late at that point. The reputation of Bob and ineffective reforms of the Office Assistant had tainted the waters.

There actually was data that many users liked this kind of interface and were just just annoyed about certain aspects of it, but Microsoft finally decided to abandon any further attempts to do anything with virtual personality-based software agents (except in Microsoft Research where the concept continues to be explored). Clippy was relegated as a joke, in a series of online animations, voiced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried (a very fitting assignment). As a result, I also went on to work on other things.

Bob in Retrospect

Bob is a bittersweet story to me. I still believe that Karen’s motivation and Nass and Reeves’ research point to an important opportunity to make interfaces easier and more efficient. In the area I focus on now, personal robotics, I see the human-robot interaction definition as one of the biggest challenges facing the nascent robots industry. Research from several universities indicates that even Roomba users treat this technology as a social personality, giving their floor cleaning robots names or other social characteristics.

Even soldiers using the iRobot Packbot in Iraq often reference their reconnaissance and IED defusing robot as if were a team member. When sending robots back for repair, teams asked for their specific bot to returned. And as interfaces evolve to be more natural, the social aspects of human interaction become more important. For example, there is ample evidence that speech interfaces are socially modulated – how something is said and who speaks it are very important to how it is perceived.

Some may wonder why Microsoft spent so much time on interactive social agents in the interface. A part of the answer reflects that people at Microsoft had a sincere desire to improve the user interface. In addition, the culture of Microsoft is that the people that work there do not give up easily—they play to win. Finally, the impact of social aspects of design was compelling, but is harder than it seems at the surface to design well.

I know that not everyone will see the potential value of appropriate applying social principles to application interfaces. But then it took some time before the cognitive aspects of good user-centered design were explored and well applied. And to this day there are some users that still prefer command-line interfaces to down-down menus and other graphical components. However, it is clear that people respond to such social attributes of technology, and learning how to apply them appropriately and effectively remains an area we need to understand better.

More on Microsoft Bob and the Office Assistants at Technologizer:

The Bob Chronicles

A Guided Tour of Microsoft Bob

The Secret Origins of Clippy

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