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.)