Morgan Freeman Will Voice Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Jarvis’
Siri has some new competition in the form of Morgan Freeman.
Mark Zuckerberg’s homemade artificial intelligence assistant Jarvis will be voiced by Freeman. His dreamy voice was selected by popular demand, according to USA Today.
Jarvis is a system that runs Zuckerberg’s household and is named after Iron Man’s Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence. The system had a synthesized voice like other such systems until now.
Turns out Freeman did have some competition for the new role though. Robert Downey Jr., who plays Stark, volunteered to be the voice of Jarvis with certain conditions.
But Zuckerberg asked for the public’s input before making the decision. Back in October the Facebook founder made a post that received over 50,000 comments, in which Freeman dominated.
Zuckberg told Fast Company he called Freeman and said: “Hey, I posted this thing, and…thousands of people want you to be the voice. Will you do it?’”
Freeman’s answered, “yeah, sure.”
This isn’t Freeman’s first voice role in the tech world though. He is a celebrity voice on Google’s navigation app Waze.
According to Fast Company, Facebook has not yet said whether Freeman will be paid for his new tech gig.
What Is Jarvis?
About a year ago the Facebook CEO announced that he planned to build an AI system as one of his personal growth challenges, a challenge he gives himself each year.
Zuckerberg wanted to use his voice to control everything in his house ranging from lights to music to temperature. Jarvis would also be able to open the front gate for friends just by recognizing their face. In a way Jarvis would be Zuckerberg’s version of Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home.
Of course this isn’t Zuckerberg’s first trip to the coding world. In 2012 his personal growth challenge was to code every day. That challenge connected him to a new wave of computer science that became vital to his company’s growth.
“My goal was to learn about the state of artificial intelligence — where we’re further along than people realize and where we’re still a long ways off. These challenges always lead me to learn more than I expected, and this one also gave me a better sense of all the internal technology Facebook engineers get to use, as well as a thorough overview of home automation,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Monday.
