Mark Zuckerberg has finally found a celebrity to voice his home AI system called Jarvis and that celebrity is Morgan Freeman.
Zuckerberg began working on building his very own digital assistant at the beginning of 2016 and took to Facebook in October to ask the public who they thought would be the perfect voice for it.
Arnold Schwarzenneger and Robert Downey Jr were popular suggestions but in a video showing Jarvis in action, Zuckerberg revealed that Morgan Freeman apparently won the public vote.
The voice of God
Zuckerberg told The Fast Company that he called Freeman up after the actor presented a science awards ceremony co-founded by Zuckerberg:
“I said, 'Hey, I posted this thing, and... thousands of people want you to be the voice. Will you do it?'” To which Zuckerberg says Freeman responded “yeah, sure.”
In the video, Zuckerberg’s digital assistant does a whole host of useful things from greeting him in the morning, to putting on his toast, to alerting him when he has visitors.
Plenty of companies including Amazon, Google, and Apple are working on creating useful digital assistants, with Amazon and Google in particular focusing on automated home technology with Amazon Echo and Google Assistant.
Having Morgan Freeman’s voice certainly helps Jarvis stand out from the other much more robotic assistants, but it’s not likely anyone other than Zuckerberg will have access to Jarvis anytime soon since the Facebook CEO said the AI’s code is “currently too tightly tied to [his] own home.”
To see Jarvis in action you can watch the video below.
