Clippy has some interesting history.
http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine
(I subbed that link, got two upvotes and zero comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219280 )
> Well, after doing some research I found out what went wrong. In a paper published in 1998 at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), the Lumiere team described the inner workings of the Assistant’s inference engine and also how much of it was included in the released version of Office 97. Below is a list of the features that were excluded from the product release (those keen enough can cross reference the list with what was demoed in the video above.)
> • No persistent user profiles.
> • No reasoning about user competence, i.e., novice versus experienced user
> • Small event queue with emphasis only on the most recent interactions of the user with the software interface (this means the engine was trying to guess the values of many variables using very little data.)
> • Separation between user interface events and word-based queries; for word-based queries the engine ignored any context and user actions.
> • Last and possibly most important and I quote from the paper, “The automated facility of providing assistance based on the likelihood that a user may need assistance or on the expected utility of such autonomous action was not employed.” Instead, “The Office team has employed a relatively simple rule-based system on top of the Bayesian query analysis system to bring the agent to the foreground with a variety of tips.” This is why Clippy kept popping up all the time. It was not using the mathematically correct engine that the researchers had designed. It was driven by some rule-based system that one or more of the developers from the product team thought was a reasonable substitute.
I don't think modern MS would make the same mistake, but who knows.