14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, enthusiasts found out that Cortana, the personal assistant that Microsoft included in Windows Phone 8.1, would come with an Easter Egg inside, one that would replace Cortana’s icon with that of Clippy, but it seems that other similar personas are also available for it.
Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant, would emerge on a Windows Phone 8.1 handset when a user asks Cortana what it thinks of it, and one Windows Phone development enthusiast, Leon Zandman, has discovered the trick behind this.
According to him, as soon as a user asks said question, Cortana sends a request to Bing, which sends back a bunch of code, including one part that triggered the appearance of Clippy on the screen.
The HTML code that Bing sends over is managed on the server side, which should allow Microsoft to expand the variety of responses that Cortana can offer to its users at ease.
At the same time, Bing would also send over the JavaScript and SSML codes that control Cortana’s vocal response, and this is what made the appearance of Clippy on Windows Phone 8.1 devices possible.
However, it seems that the actual animation that Cortana displays is not included on said Bing code, but that it is already present on the phone.
Leon Zandman used Fiddler to keep an eye on the HTTP communication of his Windows Phone device, which helped him discover the said code, as well as the fact that the aforementioned animation does not appear to come from Microsoft’s servers.
Instead, the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer SDK emulator images that Microsoft released this week unveiled that said animations were already added to Cortana, and that the code coming from Bing only triggered their display.
Apparently, the digital personal assistant can also display an older, retired Clippy, which is wearing a pair of reading glasses. The code for this animation is “clippyretired1,” it seems.
But this is not all, as Windows Phone 8.1 actually incorporates a great deal of similar animations, which can be seen on Leon Zandman’s website as GIF images.
However, he also notes that not all of these resources could actually be used as Cortana emotions (or personas), and that the two Clippy animations appear to be the real Easter Egg in Windows Phone 8.1.
However, a certain “CIRCLE_SIRI1_10” resource was also spotted in the code, which could be a reference to Apple’s Siri, though it’s unclear what it actually does. It also remains to be seen what questions can be asked in order to trigger some other animations, such as the retired Clippy.
