Clippy, if activated, always added an unnecessary step in accessing the help file. Clippy was in part bad, because the help file had a mostly useless index, leading to no or wrong answers for Clippy.
The content in the help file was additionally less than accurate, it lacked usage examples and a FAQ section that could have been used for recognizing and offering a solution to a question.
The difficult part of creating an assistant is recognizing the users' problems and offering solutions. It's the kind of experience a company can acquire with years of tech support or lots of lab testing.
Then it would have to compile that knowledge in an expert system and give it away essentiality for free.
Companies that prioritize development and/or support over documentation shouldn't try to create an assistant for the same reasons. But if you have great documentation, a great support knowledgebase, and support scripts, creating an assistant out of it will someday become as easy as keeping a Juypter notebook running.
Clippy was hated whether he was right or not. Consider the most popular catchphrase "It looks like you're writing a letter..."
In my experience, Clippy was never wrong about that - precision and recall were absolutely perfect - but people do not appreciate being interrupted, particularly at the precise moment their work has begun.
The hard part of creating an assistant is not coming up with some stuff to suggest, it's coming up with a time, place, and manner to make those suggestions so that users might be open to them.
> creating an assistant out of it will someday become as easy as keeping a Juypter notebook running.
Absolutely true, but if you intend for that assistant to proactively inject itself into people's lives, get ready to be held to an unimaginably high bar of quality.
You could check "Don't show me this tip again". That's why I don't remember it as the main problem with Clippy. I agree that it was a bad idea in the first place to interrupt a user's action. Finding the right time and manner to offer a suggestion is a hard problem even for a human being.
The difficult part of creating an assistant is recognizing the users' problems and offering solutions. It's the kind of experience a company can acquire with years of tech support or lots of lab testing. Then it would have to compile that knowledge in an expert system and give it away essentiality for free.
Companies that prioritize development and/or support over documentation shouldn't try to create an assistant for the same reasons. But if you have great documentation, a great support knowledgebase, and support scripts, creating an assistant out of it will someday become as easy as keeping a Juypter notebook running.