Technically, his name is Clippit.
clippy-gpt is a ChatGPT powered recreation of everyone's favorite paperclip assistant that came bundled in older versions of the Microsoft Office suite. Clippy hangs out on your desktop, patiently waiting to answer any questions you might encounter. You can read more about the original Clippy here.
clippy-gpt-demo.mp4
In order to take full advantage of Clippy's AI functionality, you need either an OpenAI API Key, or an OpenRouter API key. Save this key in the environmental variable OPENAI_API_KEY or OPENROUTER_API_KEY, respectively. I have included OpenRouter as an option because it provides some degree of free access to online AI models, unlike OpenAI, which, as of this writing, does not offer any free AI solutions via their API. However, I would recommend using OpenAI over the free OpenRouter option if you are willing to pay for API access.
In Linux, you can create a new environmental variable by adding something like export OPENAI_API_KEY='<Your API Key goes here>' to your .bashrc file.
In Windows, you can launch sysdm.cpl from the mod + R menu. On the Advanced tab, press the Environmental Variables button. From that screen, you can create a new system variable called OPENAI_API_KEY and assign it the value of your API key.
In some setups on both Windows and Linux, a reboot may be needed for these changes to take effect.
You'll need to install the dependencies listed in requirements.txt. The process may vary depending on how your system is configured, but generally you can do this by downloading requirements.txt and then running
pip install -r requirements.txt
Once the dependencies are installed, you can download the latest binary from the releases page. Make this binary executable, and you should be good to go!
clippy-gpt can be built with PyInstaller.
Again, you must first install all of the dependencies from requirements.txt (See above).
Then, run
pyinstaller main.spec
from inside of the git repository's root directory.
This should create a directory called dist/ inside of which you should see a new binary file.
Clippy got a lot of hate in his day, but I always liked the little guy! I have fond memories from the elementary school computer lab, where instead of writing my essays like I should have been, I'd spend entire class periods cycling though all of Clippy's animations and dragging him around the screen to funny positions. Now, I can do that all over again. I suppose I never really grew up much. Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
Contributions are always welcome! Just open an issue about any bugs/feature requests/etc. If you want to address what you found yourself, fork it to pull request pipeline. I'll merge anything that looks cool. (I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to collaborating on GitHub but I think this is generally what the process looks like.) For anything more nuanced, you can always reach out to me.
This is a list of projects that proved to be extremely valuable resources when trying to create clippy-gpt. I highly recommend you check them out and consider giving them a star or whatever it is people do to show appreciation to a project on GitHub.
- clippyjs -- The sprite sheet, animation definitions, and sound effects were all sourced from this project.
- ClippyVS -- Clippy in Visual Studio.
- Clippy -- Another Clippy as an AI front-end. This one is set up to work with local LLMs. I might go that same direction with this project someday, but I haven't really gotten that deep into toying around with local LLMs yet.
And then of course, there is the original Clippy from Microsoft Office.