Also known as the voice of God With the proliferation of voice-activated home assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo, soon we?ll be sitting in our living rooms verbally directing robots to complete mundane household tasks. But what voice do we want responding to our orders to dim the lights" Facebook?s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is working on a new AI that will talk back in the voice of God. Or at least someone who played him once in a movie: Morgan Freeman.
As Fast Company first reported, over the past year, Zuckerberg personally built the new home assistant, named Jarvis:
Over the last year, though, Zuckerberg has spent between 100 and 150 hours on his home project. Though it's named for Tony Stark?s futuristic Jarvis AI in the Iron Man movies, it's more akin to a homemade, highly personal version of something like Amazon?s Alexa service, letting him and his wife Priscilla Chan use a custom iPhone app or a Facebook Messenger bot to turn lights on and off, play music based on personal tastes, open the front gate for friends, make toast, and even wake up their one-year-old daughter Max with Mandarin lessons. A few months ago, when Zuckerberg publicly asked who should replace Jarvis?s synthetic voice, Robert Downey Jr. volunteered to voice Jarvis, as long as Paul Bettany, who voiced Jarvis in the Iron Man films, got a cut, and the money went to a charity picked by co-star Benedict Cumberbatch (although, let?s be honest here, most of us would much rather have B...