Mico, Microsoft’s New Copilot Avatar, Hides a Familiar Face

Microsoft’s latest Copilot update brings a familiar little metal office supply back to life. Clippy—the infamous paperclip assistant from the early 2000s—has returned as an easter egg inside Copilot’s new animated avatar, Mico. And while the move is framed as playful nostalgia (ah nostalgia), it’s also a lightning rod for everything Microsoft still hasn’t solved about digital assistants: context, consent, and control. You know, the three Cs.

Mico Is the New Face of Copilot

Mico is Microsoft’s new animated avatar for Copilot, designed to make voice interactions feel more human. It listens, reacts, and changes shape depending on what it’s doing—thinking, responding, or waiting. It’s stylized, non-photoreal, and intentionally abstract to avoid the uncanny valley. Just a floating yellow blob for you to converse with. But if you tap Mico enough times in preview builds, it morphs into Clippy. Yes, that Clippy.

The transformation is cosmetic, not functional, thank the highest powers. Clippy doesn’t take over your screen or start offering unsolicited formatting advice, which seems like a missed opportunity in all reality. But the callback is unmistakable—and it’s reminding many of the frustrations that they’ve endured.

Clippy Wasn’t Just Annoying—It Was a Warning

Clippy became shorthand for everything wrong with early digital assistants: intrusive, context-blind, and always showing up when you didn’t want it. It was funny, yes—but it was the type of funny that only made you laugh once before the joke got old two seconds later. And now, Microsoft is betting that users will see the Clippy easter egg as a wink, not a warning. 

Microsoft is paying attention to three types of constraints when it comes to Mico:

• Scope: surface the avatar only in voice mode, Learn Live, or specific Copilot surfaces rather than across every app.
• Optionality: provide toggles so users can disable the avatar or memory features.
• Non‑photoreal design: avoid faces to reduce emotional over‑attachment.

These are smart moves. But they only work if the defaults respect them. Early reports suggest Mico is enabled by default in U.S. voice contexts. That matters. Because optional features aren’t really optional if users have to dig through settings to turn them off. Really, who wants to click through five menus to find that one obscure setting?

Memory, Monetization, and Misalignment