On top of the legal problems, BonziBuddy grew more irksome in an attempt to monetize their userbase. This led to Bonzi collecting personal information about children without parental consent. On this registration form, BonziBuddy asked for the name, address, and ages of its users. Whenever BonziBuddy launched, it prompted users to register online as pretty much every application did in those days. This app let you record audio and attach a picture to email.

Bonzi was a showman and he would not be upstaged by your spreadsheets. Ultimately, BonziBuddy was more useful as a toy than a real productivity program.

You could sync your POP3 email so Bonzi could read off your messages to you. Anyone who watched a Flash animation in the early aughts knows how much fun you can have with an early speech synthesizer you control. The company created their own cartoon character that was somehow sillier than a talking green parrot: a talking purple monkey. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the WizardRobby the RobotGenie the Genieand Peedy the Parrot. The default skin for Office Assistant was Clippit commonly shortened to Clippya paper clip with googly eyes and a penchant for bothering you as soon as you started working on a document. As part of the Office 97 release, Microsoft introduced Office Assistant, an animated character that would pop up to help you do things as you worked. He promised to help you use the internet, but mostly he just got in the way. Bonzi Buddy.Joinsubscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. You can help Vinesauce Wiki by expanding it. Sign In Don't have an account? Start a Wiki. The original webpage was shut down in but is still available on mirror sites. As a result of multiple claims of the program being adware and spyware, Bonzi Software was involved in legal trouble and discontinued the Bonzi program, while still keeping the webpage up. Joel now-famously entered his name as 'Expand Dong', which is now a meme in the vinesauce community. One of the programs Joel downloaded was Bonzi Buddy. The program is most well-known for actually being a malicious spyware program that can install viruses on the user's computer and cause the computer to become infected with multiple unwanted programs and various problems, including changing their browser without consent. The computer program appears as a helper that can interact with the user, from telling jokes and asking questions to doing searches and helping with files. Bonzi Buddy is the mascot character of a computer program of the same name.

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