Morgan Freeman Lending Voice For Mark Zuckerberg’s Home Assistant Jarvis

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is developing a AI home assistant akin to the Google Home and Amazon Echo, and Morgan Freeman has agreed to be the voice.

MORGAN FREEMAN TO VOICE AI PROJECT JARVIS

The project, called Jarvis, is being developed by Zuckerberg, who wants to be able to control everything in his home with just his voice. Initially Robert Downey, Jr. volunteered to voice the project, but Zuckerberg decided to ask the public what they wanted. After more than 50,000 comments, Freeman was the clear preference.

“Hey, I posted this thing and…thousands of people want you to be the voice,” Zuckerberg reportedly told Freeman. “Will you do it?”

“Yeah sure,” was the actor’s response. Freeman’s voice is often heralded as the best of our time and has lent his voice to many projects. He is a celebrity voice on Google’s navigation app Waze. Facebook has not disclosed whether or not Freeman will be paid for his work.

Zukcerberg began working on Jarvis nearly a year ago as a personal growth challenge. “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 said in a Facebook post this week. “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,”