Microsoft makes Copilot "human-centered" with a '90s-style animated assistant (arstechnica.com)

Microsoft is giving Windows 11’s Copilot a literal face: an optional animated assistant called “Mico” — a warm, customizable blob that listens, reacts and changes color as you speak — alongside improvements to voice controls. The move is explicitly framed as part of Microsoft’s push toward “human-centered AI,” combining expressive visual feedback with speech and the underlying language/reasoning models that now power Copilot. The design nods to ’90s-era assistants like Clippy and Cortana, but Microsoft says modern contextual understanding and LLM-driven reasoning will avoid the old pitfalls of canned prompts and limited input handling. For the AI/ML community this signals renewed interest in multimodal, embodied interfaces that pair generative models with real-time UI affordances. Key technical implications include tighter integration of speech recognition, intent detection, dialogue management and visual state signaling (e.g., color changes to reflect confidence or activity), plus personalization and optionality to reduce user annoyance. It also raises challenges around grounding model responses, managing uncertainty, privacy of voice data, and latency for smooth animations and replies. If done well, Mico could demonstrate how expressive, model-aware front-ends improve accessibility and engagement; done poorly, it risks repeating the usability mistakes of earlier assistants.