Clippy is back, this time with the powers of ChatGPT

Devesh Beri

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Guess who’s making a comeback? It’s none other than the infamous Clippy, the virtual assistant from the Microsoft Office days! But this time, Clippy is back with a high-tech upgrade and some ChatGPT superpowers.

Meanwhile, if your ChatGPT is not working due to a high-demand error, here’s how you can fix it.

According to BGR, FireCubeStudios has resurrected our favorite paperclip friend and given it new skills. Now, Clippy can help you with more than just Word and Excel.

The upgraded Clippy, fueled by GPT technology, welcomes users by offering assistance and specifically guides them on, for example, on changing their wallpaper upon request.

Clippy provides accurate advice by suggesting that users right-click on their desktop and select the “Personalize” option to choose a new wallpaper.

To utilize the AI-driven Clippy, users must obtain an OpenAI API key, which can be acquired through registration on the OpenAI website. During the initial three-month period, users receive $5 worth of API credit at no cost, enabling them to obtain API tokens GPT uses for text processing.

Typically, a single API token corresponds to around four characters of everyday English text. OpenAI charges $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, allowing users to process approximately 2.5 million tokens, equivalent to approximately 650,000 letters, during the free trial.

Clippy, once an interface for Microsoft Office’s “Help” manuals, was active in the Office suite from 1997 to 2003. While it had simpler features than AI-driven assistants, Clippy relied on less advanced statistical techniques for its responses. Despite some nostalgia, most users found Clippy irritating and distracting, leading to its default disablement in Office XP (2001) and complete removal from Office 2007 onwards.

Microsoft recently announced its GPT-powered Copilot assistant, slated to replace Cortana in the coming months. Introduced to Windows in 2014, Cortana relied on Microsoft’s Bing search engine for its functionality.