So, uh... fun web history time... this actually kinda existed.
When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)
And one of the ActiveX objects they released for this functionality was, basically, Clippy. It was called the Microsoft Agent [1]. It included a number of characters, but you could bring up the real, actual-factual Clippy in Internet Explorer. You could also use text-to-speech to actually speak to the user. It had an API that allowed you to trigger certain pre-cooked animations, move it around the page, etc.
In an advanced mode, you could also specify your own graphics files. It also allowed you to specify graphics for something like 5 different mouth shapes, so you could reasonably lip-sync your new wizard object. I did this to my University's logo back in the day.
I say it "kinda" existed because, technically, this wasn't its own tag. It was an instance of the OBJECT tag [2]. But there was a time where at least in Internet Explorer there literally was HTML you could write that would put the literal Clippy on your web page.
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/access... - "[Microsoft Agent is deprecated as of Windows 7, and may be unavailable in subsequent versions of Windows.]" "To keep Agent running between pages (and thereby keep a character visible), create another client that remains loaded between page changes. For example, you can create an HTML frameset and declare an tag for Agent in the parent frame." Remember frames?
"a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)"
This reminds me, one of the small enduring legacies of the 90s X-TREME! craze is that Microsoft still does a lot of marketing around the letter X, even today, like the XBox. And that goes back to ActiveX and DirectX being named in an era where that was intended to make Microsoft sound Hip and Cool and With It. I suppose at this point the XBox has transcended this, and is now just a name.
> I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.
Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.)
Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy.
"Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy."
Ah, yes... clarification: I never encountered it in the wild on a webpage that wasn't specifically about the Microsoft Agent. I did have a couple of commercial programs that used it, though nothing huge.
It did require a machine with what at the time was a generous amount of RAM to handle everything that spun up to run that thing. Nowadays, of course, it would be nothing, lost in the noise of the fluctuation of your Slack window, but at the time, megabytes of RAM were still a pretty big deal.
It is true I never installed Bonzi Buddy, but I was aware it used the Microsoft Agent. ISTR someone thinking it must take a ton of programming to make that happen, and I actually showed them my animated school logo and how little code it took to prove the opposite.
A lot of people saw Agents (and Bob before it) and expected Alexa/Siri/Cortana-level interaction. Agents were very good in relatively simple animation techniques at conveying an outer complexity that belied the simplicity of most of the actual code written for them.
(That's part of why the "games" webpages I made with them, and the PPTs as well, impressed people a lot more than the rather rudimentary "screenplays" I was actually writing them as felt to me. I felt like I got more credit for that work than I probably deserved.)
I think a lot of people kind of assumed that that level of interaction did exist and was happening behind the curtain, hence some of the very loud and vocal disappointment with Agents, especially in the Office Assistant form that they were never smart enough. I think it was an uncanny valley effect between user experience and user expectations.
It's somewhat ironic that one of the reasons stopping us from applying as much animated "personality" to Alexa/Siri/Cortana seems to be that residual dislike of Agents/Office Assistants despite that in some cases at least it seems like we are ever closer to getting past that uncanny valley.
Similarly interesting, it's also interesting to note that even the Office Assistant animation engine and support for text-to-speech and speech-to-text was extremely stripped down and underpowered compared to the Agents engine bundled with Windows. One more of those areas where the Office team needing to support older versions of Windows and other platforms pushed them to use a half-baked fork of the full Windows feature rather than just rely on a Windows feature.
(It's interesting to see even today which Office features are getting UWP treatment and how, with the most interesting part of "how" being how much they are moving to React Native.)
When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)
And one of the ActiveX objects they released for this functionality was, basically, Clippy. It was called the Microsoft Agent [1]. It included a number of characters, but you could bring up the real, actual-factual Clippy in Internet Explorer. You could also use text-to-speech to actually speak to the user. It had an API that allowed you to trigger certain pre-cooked animations, move it around the page, etc.
In an advanced mode, you could also specify your own graphics files. It also allowed you to specify graphics for something like 5 different mouth shapes, so you could reasonably lip-sync your new wizard object. I did this to my University's logo back in the day.
I say it "kinda" existed because, technically, this wasn't its own tag. It was an instance of the OBJECT tag [2]. But there was a time where at least in Internet Explorer there literally was HTML you could write that would put the literal Clippy on your web page.
A gallery of the available characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9yBfDLjsI
I didn't find any videos of the Clippy character used in a web page, but it shipped in the default control, I'm fairly sure.
I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCiSRQGJX4
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/access... - "[Microsoft Agent is deprecated as of Windows 7, and may be unavailable in subsequent versions of Windows.]" "To keep Agent running between pages (and thereby keep a character visible), create another client that remains loaded between page changes. For example, you can create an HTML frameset and declare an tag for Agent in the parent frame." Remember frames?