SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the no-matter-how-many-bullets-you-put-in-it-keeps-coming-back dept.
Copilot now has its own virtual character for its voice mode:
It's been nearly 30 years since Microsoft's Office assistant, Clippy, first graced our screens as an annoying paperclip. After the Groucho-browed interruptions of Clippy came to an end in 2001 with Office XP, Microsoft tried to revive the spirit of an assistant with Cortana on Windows Phone. The technology still wasn't quite there a decade ago, but now Microsoft is ready to try again with Mico, a new character for Copilot's voice mode.
"Clippy walked so that we could run," jokes Jacob Andreou, corporate VP of product and growth at Microsoft AI, in an interview with The Verge. Microsoft has been testing Mico (rhymes with "pico") for a few months now, as a virtual character that responds with real-time expressions when you talk to it. Mico is now being turned on by default in Copilot's voice mode, where you'll also have the option to turn the bouncing orb off.
"You can see it, it reacts as you speak to it, and if you talk about something sad you'll see its facial expressions react almost immediately," explains Andreou. "All the technology fades into the background, and you just start talking to this cute orb and build this connection with it."
Mico will only be available in the US at launch, and this new Copilot virtual character will also rely on a new memory feature inside Copilot to be able to surface facts it has learned about you and the things you're working on.
Microsoft is also adding a Learn Live mode to Mico that will turn the character into a Socratic tutor that "guides you through concepts instead of just giving answers." It even uses interactive whiteboards and visual cues, and looks like it's targeted at students preparing for finals or anyone trying to practice a new language.
[...] Mico also forms a key part of Microsoft's new initiative to get people to talk to their computers. The software maker is running ads on TV marketing the latest Windows 11 PCs as "the computer you can talk to." Microsoft tried to convince people to use Cortana on Windows 10 PCs a decade ago, and that effort ended in the Cortana app being shut down on Windows 11 a couple of years ago.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday October 27 2025, @03:44PM
We didn't just learn them when they were less hand-holdy, but the older folks of those generations were key to the things existing at all. The irony of sorts here is that with how easy it is to create a VM at home to use for learning to do things without impacting your broader software environment that the UI is still being dumbed down. Just yesterday I was struggling mightily to get n8n set up in a VM because most of the instructions on the net are just flat out broken due to just how poorly thought out the installation process for both npm and docker are. I did manage it eventually, but it wasn't possible to install on Linux Mint without downloading stuff that isn't in the default repositories. I wound up completely wiping the VM like 5 or 6 times before I found instructions that actually worked.
Which is something that is rather frustrating. On the one hand, there is a bunch of extremely dumbed down software and on the other there's stuff like docker that are unnecessarily annoying to install just to install something that could just as easily be run in a sandbox that only sandboxes the process, doesn't insist on handling a bunch of other stuff as well.