Whenever BonziBuddy launched, it prompted users to register online (as pretty much every application did in those days). On this registration form, BonziBuddy asked for the name, address, and ages of its users. Separately in 2004, Bonzi Software was forced to pay a $75,000 fine to the FTC for violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. They also had to pay over $170,000 in legal fees. When they settled in 2003, Bonzi agreed to stop employing fake “X” buttons that didn’t actually close the ad, and was forced to clearly label their popups as ads. In 2002, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit over its use of deceptive ads. Anyone who watched a Flash animation in the early aughts knows how much fun you can have with an early speech synthesizer you control.īonzi Software, the company behind your buddy, faced a few separate legal issues in the time from 1999 to 2004, when BonziBuddy was finally discontinued. You could also make Bonzi say whatever you wanted with it’s text-to-speech feature. Bonzi would occasionally speak up to share a lame joke or sing a song in a nauseatingly robotic voice, but he talked funny. While speech synthesizers existed well before that, most people didn’t have a user-friendly way to play with them.
This is also how many young people learned not to download things just because they’re free.īonzi’s speech engine (part of the Microsoft Agent suite), was a huge novelty around the time it was released in 1999.
BonziBuddy was free, so there seemed to be no harm in downloading it. This meant that anyone from eight year olds to their grandmothers could download the “cute purple monkey” and play with it just for fun. BonziBuddy may have essentially been a worse version of Clippy, but it had one thing going for it that Clippy didn’t have: It wasn’t tied to office software.
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