Office assistant

Office assistant is an animated character designed to assist the user in Microsoft Office. It was introduced in Microsoft Office 97 and removed in Microsoft Office 2007.

Assistants
The 1997 assistants can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.
 * Bosgrove (a butler)
 * Dot (a shape-shifting and color-shifting smiley-faced red ball)
 * Earl (a blue, cartoon cat. A Microsoft spokesperson at a Microsoft Big Day reportedly stated he needed his dialog "cleaned up" before he was released, as he was used as an internal "debugging assistant".)
 * Genie (a genie)
 * Genius (a caricature of Albert Einstein)
 * Hoverbot (a robot)
 * Kairu the Dolphin (available for East Asian editions, downloadable for Office 97)
 * Max (a Macintosh Plus computer) (Macintosh)
 * Merlin (a wizard)
 * Mother Nature (a globe)
 * Office Logo (a jigsaw puzzle)
 * Peedy (a green parrot, whose name was ultimately reused in the first iteration of the notorious BonziBuddy software)
 * Power Pup (a superhero dog)
 * Robby (a robot)
 * Scribble (an origami-esque cat)
 * Will (a caricature of William Shakespeare)
 * Clippy (a paperclip, the default)

How it worked
In Office 97, it was based on Microsoft BOB, then in 2000 and later it used Microsoft Agent.