Remember that obnoxious paper clip from
MS Office? It's back, and it brought its
older siblings.
From the MSDN website:
Microsoft® Agent is a set of software services that supports the presentation of software agents as interactive personalities within the Microsoft Windows® interface. Microsoft Agent's conversational interface approach is an extension and enhancement of the existing interactive modalities of the Windows interface.
While MS Agent technology does have some cool features, such as text to speech and voice recognition, I really wish Microsoft would give up on the cutesy angle.