Clipippy, the famous animated trombone of Microsoft, makes a comeback in an unofficial iteration. Appeared for the first time in 1996 with Office 97, this assistant’s mission was to help users better exploit the office suite. It was then rebuilt in 2003, with the arrival of Windows XP, becoming a cult figure in the history of the software.
Today, Clipippy returns to life thanks to the initiative of Felix Rieseberg, a developer based in San Francisco, passionate about the old Microsoft operating systems. On the GitHub platform, he describes his project as a “love letter and a tribute to the late Clippy”.
The application he has developed is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It allows the assistant to operate in the location of the major modern language models (LLM), such as Llama 3.2 of Meta, Gemma 3 from Google, Phi-4 from Microsoft, or Qwen3 of Alibaba in a retro interface faithful to that of Windows 98. These models can be installed directly on the user’s computer, without dependence on the cloud.
“Consider this as software art,” explains Felix Rieseberg. “And if you don’t like it, see it as software satire,” he adds with humor, reports The Register site.
This is not the first time that Clippy has been trying a comeback. After a return in 2023 in a doped version to Chatgpt, in November 2024, another developer had resurrected the office of office in the form of an AI-SNIP renamed AI assistant, capable of analyzing screenshots. For his part, Microsoft had released Clipippy from his retirement in 2021, through a retro sticker pack offered on his collaborative Teams platform, playing on the nostalgic fiber of users.
