The legendary Clippy assistant is back in a third-party open-source utility called Winpilot for Windows 11. It’s designed to remove unwanted software, disable annoying UI elements, and clean up Windows 11 from ads, as Tom’s Hardware reports.

Clippy helped users complete tasks in versions of Office released between 1997 and 2004. Microsoft officially abandoned Clippy with the debut of Office 2007.

Winpilot has been around since 2023 and was originally called BloatyNosy. Today’s version 2024.5.6 adds Tiny11builder to its feature set, which creates a stripped-down Windows 11 installation ISO image.

Other features include the ability to disable personalized ads, restore the full context menu, clean up preloaded software, and disable Bing content search.

Clippy

To help users navigate through Winpilot’s features, Clippy and its speech/interactive bubble are placed on top of the program interface.

When you first start Winpilot and throughout your interaction with the program, Clippy will provide you with the opportunity to ask questions and suggest actions, such as “Check Windows version” or “Decompress my system.”

The developer did not create the Clippy functionality on his own, but used the code from another open source project called Clippy by FireCube. Unlike Winpilot, the FireCube app allows you to install Clippy directly on your Windows 11 desktop, connect it to GPT 3.5 (using an API key), and use it as a real chatbot with artificial intelligence.