News

Microsoft Is Resurrecting Clippy With Its New 3D Emoji

All new emoji are rendered in beautiful 3D, and the majority of them are animated to make them even more fun to use.

Published

5 years ago

July 22, 2021

microsoft is resurrecting clippy with its new 3d emoji

Remember Clippy, the whimsical paperclip assistant included in older versions of Microsoft Office? Well, Clippy is back. Well, kind of.

Microsoft understands that most people were happy to see the interactive animated character disappear from their office suite of choice. Still, the company’s designers just couldn’t resist included it in the refreshed set of 1,800+ emoji that will soon make its way into Windows, Office, and other Microsoft 365 products, including Teams.

clippy replaces the old and flat paperclip

All new emoji are rendered in beautiful 3D, and the majority of them are animated to make them even more fun to use when instant messaging with friends, discussing work with colleagues, or planning the new next family get-together.

“Body language, subtle forms of humor, or environmental conditions — while we can see and respond to those cues those in-person, the loss of them in digital contexts impacts our communication greatly. With emoji, however, a few pixels can telegraph our thoughts and feelings in ways that are fun, clear, and emotionally resonant,” Claire Anderson, Art Director & Emojiologist at Microsoft, commented the role emoji have come to play in our modern lives.

The design principles that guided the look and feel of Microsoft’s new emoji revolve around emotional honesty and playfulness. The goal is to empower all users of Microsoft products to express themselves as openly and naturally as possible, even when separated by borders or even entire continents.

Also Read: Windows 11 Is Coming: Here’s What To Expect

Microsoft’s design principles are based on a substantial body of research suggesting that play encourages innovation. It will be interesting to see how the users of Microsoft products from around the world will put the new emoji set to use. Perhaps, it will really help them unlock their creative potential and nurture stronger relationships with the people they communicate with on a regular basis.

News

At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value

Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.

Published

6 days ago

May 20, 2026

Nour Nasir

at io 2026 sundar pichai concedes ai must deliver real value

Google

Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.

Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.

The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.

Also Read: DJI Teases Dual-Camera Osmo Pocket 4P For 2026 Launch

Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.

What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.