Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg just released his very own computer-controlled virtual assistant which he named “Jarvis.” His home AI assistant is said to control things inside the Zuckerberg’s household. But what makes it even more interesting is that the voice of Jarvis is the “London Has Fallen” actor, Morgan Freeman.
The system that Mark created was inspired by Tony Spark’s Jarvis AI from the Robert Downey Jr’s movie, “Iron Man.” Back in October, the young CEO asked the public who should the voice. His Facebook post got around 50,000 comments. And by popular demand, Freeman’s iconic voice was chosen.
Zuckerberg shared to Fast Company that he did not expect that Jarvis’ voice will end up to be Freeman’s. Mark saw Morgan at the Breakthrough awards and after that, he called him and said, “Hey, I posted this thing, and...thousands of people want you to be the voice. Will you do it?” And Freeman answered, "Yeah, sure."
Most of the time Mark’s family interacts with Jarvis through text. They use either the Messenger bot or the custom iPhone app although there are commands that need to be spoken. Given that, Freeman is going to record more commands and even fragments of speech.
Zuckerberg explained further that "Once you can speak to it, and it can speak back, it just feels much more—I don’t want to say part of the family, because that’s too much—but it just feels more embodied, so Max just loves it.”
Mark shared through his Facebook post that building Jarvis was his personal challenge for 2016. The Facebook CEO explained that “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.”
He added, “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.”
Meanwhile, Jobs & Hire reported that Facebook is said to offer more jobs in 2017. The careers mentioned were Technical, Engineering, and Recruiting teams.
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