Microsoft has introduced Mico, a virtual assistant that appears when working with Copilot AI. It resembles the famous Clippy assistant for Microsoft Office, which appeared almost 30 years ago.
Microsoft has introduced Mico, a virtual assistant that appears when working with Copilot AI. It resembles the famous Clippy assistant for Microsoft Office, which appeared almost 30 years ago.
«Clippy walked so we could run,» Jacob Andreu, corporate vice president of products and development at Microsoft AI, told The Verge.
Clippy disappeared in 2001 with Microsoft Office XP, and the company tried to replace it with Cortana on Windows Phone. However, assistant technology back then wasn’t as advanced as it is now.
Microsoft has been testing Mico for several months as a virtual character that responds in real time when spoken to. Mico is enabled by default in Copilot voice mode, and looks like a bouncing, wobbling ball.
«You can see it, he reacts when you talk to him, and if you talk about something sad, you’ll see his facial expression change almost instantly. All the technology takes a back seat, and you just start talking to this cute little ball and building a connection with it,» Andreu explains.
Mico is only available in the US at launch, and this new virtual Copilot character will also rely on a new memory feature within Copilot to be able to detect facts it has learned about the user.
The new assistant is also a key part of Microsoft’s new push to get people talking to their computers. The software maker is running TV ads promoting its latest Windows 11 PCs as «computers you can talk to.» Microsoft tried to convince people to use Cortana on Windows 10 PCs a decade ago, but that effort ended with the Cortana app being shut down on Windows 11 a few years ago.
«It’s interesting that you mentioned Clippy; there’s a reference [to it] in Mico. If you press Mico really quickly, something special can happen. In a way, we’re all living in Clippy’s shadow,» Andreu noted.
Recall that the Ukrainian company MacPaw, which created such popular Mac products as CleanMyMac and Setapp, introduced Eney at CES 2025. MacPaw claims that he is more than just another AI assistant, and rather a friendly companion or colleague.
«We didn’t set out to simply create another AI assistant — we wanted to develop something that could understand users on a deeper level. I call Eney a ‘computer creature,’ an AI companion with a distinct personality that changes the way people interact with their Macs by combining human-like intelligence with proactive task completion,» explained MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan.
