Hey, remember Clippy? Remember how much you loved that little fella? How people have only positive memories of the clip-shaped virtual assistant and don't find him an annoying scourge on an otherwise legendary OS? Well, Microsoft is trying to replicate that.

It's not the first time we've seen Microsoft dip into the past for its inspiration. We've only just learned that the company wants to bring back the days of voice activation with Copilot. Now, the new era of Microsoft digital assistants is here, and its name is Mico.

Microsoft reveals Mico, its new AI-powered virtual assistant

In an update on YouTube and with a statement to the Associated Press, Microsoft explains what Mico (pronounced "Mee-ko") is, exactly. Visually, he's a happy little blob who acts as a 'persona' for Copilot. On a technical level, he allows people to talk to him as if he were a living being, which Microsoft hopes will help people resonate with the LLM.

In its statement to the Associated Press, Jacob Andreou, corporate vice president of product and growth for Microsoft AI, described what the company wants its users to feel when speaking with Mico:

“When you talk about something sad, you can see Mico’s face change. You can see it dance around and move as it gets excited with you. It’s in this effort of really landing this AI companion that you can really feel.”

This then begs the question: Is it smart to give an LLM an avatar that can convey emotion and respond like a human would? Andreou believes that making an AI as soulless as possible isn't the way forward, but neither is creating a partner that people will emotionally rely on. Instead, the company wants to hit a middle-ground where it will challenge what we say and won't "tell us exactly what we want to hear, confirm biases we already have, or even suck you in from a time-spent perspective and just try to kind of monopolize and deepen the session and increase the time you’re spending with these systems.”

Andreou goes on to explain that, while dressing up an AI as an alluring personality is fantastic for getting users onto a service, it does nothing to actually aid them with their lifelong goals. As such, Microsoft likely wants to make Mico resonate just enough that it allows people to speak to it as if it were a person, but not so much that they become dependent on what Mico has to say. And given how AI can act as a dangerous "yes man" to malicious thought processes, that's a smart move.