Project J.A.R.V.I.S.

[brightcove vid=76029544001&exp3=16977198001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=245991542&w=470&h=325]

Project J.A.R.V.I.S. is an attempt to create a digital life assistant, or DLA. The name comes from the version in the movie Iron Man. While the details of the build are pretty slim, you can see that he’s using a mac mini for the base with an Arduino controlled RFID reader at his door. What is really interesting is how functional he has actually made it. Watch the video on the site to see a pretty good explanation of features.

[via Gizmodo]

59 thoughts on “Project J.A.R.V.I.S.

  1. This seems awesome, but I read somewhere else (I believe on Engadget) that he plans to commercialize the platform, meaning it will inevitably remain closed source, and not allow for as full of a hacking experience as this deserves.

  2. bah no source :(

    not a good business plan to show it off and then hide it for the long time it takes to commercialize it.

    people won’t be as excited the second time round ;)

  3. I won’t be satisfied until there’s a big red glowing electronic eye that can read my lips while I’m plotting to unplug it. If it can’t resist me, I don’t want to live with it.

    [this is pretty awesome btw, sounds like what Gates has in his mansion but at a millionth of the cost.]

  4. It seems to have a lot in common with some of the smarthome programs. It sounds like a domain specific AI with voice synth and recog, patched into MisterHouse. So, he’s probably working with opensource code, as his base, and extending it out. When he comes out with this, he may plan on selling franchises/training and services, not the software.

  5. This really seems like a bunch of smoke and mirrors to me. Showing you what he wants you to see and therefore making it seem alot cooler than it actually is.

    The idea is sound, but I don’t think that he has really done much but make a complicated music box.

  6. Kind of silly… the overall idea is a good one (a bit unoriginal), but does it have to be so cheesy?

    “Jarvis, what is on my netflix cue?”… really? I’m not looking forward to that future.

  7. So trendy it hurts.

    It seems to have achieved a trifecta which gets it onto Hackaday without a second thought (and without an actual hack in sight) these days:

    Apple Product – Check
    Arduino – Check
    Twitter – Check

  8. I’ve worked at places where the employees had to use the RFID cards for tracking which area of the building they were in and that didn’t go over well at all. Could you see this guy giving his friends the cards and expecting them to check in and out every time they walk through the door?

  9. I applaud the effort in creating your own home automation system, but I’m not really too impressed with this one. The part about Jarvis in Ironman that made it so cool, and a system I would love to have in my home, is that Jarvis didn’t seem like a computer; you had conversations instead of making commands. All of the functionality in this system could easily be replicated with MisterHouse, or LinuxMCE (pluto home).

  10. Maybe I’ve just watched too many sci-fi movies, but this seems quite creepy to me. If one of my friends ever gives me an rfid chip to carry around so he can track me, he won’t be my friend no more lol.

  11. i like the idea of how he added the ardruino. It’d be nice if we could just run a ton of stuff like this on the cheap without doing all the work one off. There are lots of really expensi\/e home automation hardware’s out there that can’t do e\/en half this… can’t wait to ha\/e one that heats up my shower and makes my coffee in the morning. :D

  12. I’ve been using something similar for a long time now, under my linux machine. I now use http://simon-listens.org/index.php?id=122&L=1 for speech recognition via a bt headset and proprietary cepstral voice synth. I also wrote a wrapper for cepstral engine, that samples periodically the amplitude of the speech and outputs it to leds connected to LPT. The whole thing is quite hacky and is mostly a user interface for a bunch of bash scripts and small programs that do the job. (unix way =) )
    So I suggest burying this jarvis, if it’s proprietary.

  13. I’ve been running something similar minus the voice recognition for some years now. Instead of RFID, it uses your cellphone’s bluetooth MAC address to determine if you’re at home or not.

  14. Get the thing to trend what you like to watch and keep an eye on the cable lineup, then let you know when there’s something on, instead of having you scour the channels…I could dig that.

  15. Using the bluetooth MAC address of cellphones is a much better idea than trying to get people to use RFID. Then you only have to worry about a savy friend turning thier bluetooth off to save battery.

  16. Lacking features:
    Calender feature that reminds you of the events on the planner or upcoming when you check in and out.
    Google Voice so that you can say call XXX and then have it routed through your cell phone or home phone.
    Faster response time…
    I would just have an RFID reader in the doorway that picks up when you come and go without having to swipe, but if he could have it lock/unlock his door though.

  17. I use Ultra HAL as my DLA.
    http://zabaware.com/assistant/
    easy to modify and fairly quick to learn. I imported the Predator film script which caused some language problems but was funny to hear random movie lines from Predator in convo. I would encourage others on HAD to check it out and see the results. My first speech program (dragonsoft) I modified in a Navy sort of way to listen with the mic at the window and type Ford F-150 when that truck came to park in my parking lot. I think there were 10 cars “programmed” that way and two dogs that lived in the complex. It was more of a proof of concept thing in ’99 but my Instructor ended up getting a meeting with a Colonel and he liked the simplicity lol. Never heard naything else (because it was a lame project) but may give some of you other ideas as to what you can do. My Ultra Hal hears the sputtering of the coffee maker in the other room when it is at the end of making and will say “coffee’s ready if you are” It is simply a matter of getting it to “listen” to the sound and create an event from that. My wife thinks it is weird so I kinda have to work with it when she isn’t around to laugh at me talking to a half literate computer lol.
    -I know- Cool story bro…

  18. I use my cellphone as my main calendar because I always have it with me. The computer calendar (remind) grabs the events on the phone via BT (opensync) periodically, with no interaction on my part (cron). Every morning, if I’m at home, the computer wakes me up (cron again), plays some music (mpd) and reads aloud the events for the day (festival) along with date, time and weather info fetched from the net. It’s all just a bunch of shell scripts tying everything together.

    All I have to do is make sure my cellphone is always on and keep the battery charged.

    It’s neat, and always funny when having someone else stay for the night. More so if they have watched Iron-Man ;)

    I attempted to add voice recognition, but found it too unreliable. I use an infrared remote (lirc) for the most common actions such as snooze and media playback control.

  19. Aw, half the stuff in that video I was hoping to build. Obviously someone beat me to it. CRAP. >.>

    At least when I build my DLA, I’ll give it more sensors and a butler-style-accent; therefore being more awesome. =p

  20. Engy you can give most of the current DLAs pretty much any accent you like as long as you have the speech sdk pack. It is really funny to hear english in a Thai accent :)

  21. As one of your users said they use ultra hal, the same as I do. it is very easy to integrate all this into your computer. By all means I give you cudos for setting up your house. You have to love technology.

  22. I made something similar before he even came up with that!! In Applescript just like he is! I called mine Jarvis too and linked it to loads of other Applescripts which do different things. The interface was just a window with a box, which you can type almost anything in and it’ll carry out your instructions. It runs applescripts when it sees certain keywords.

    It can also say good morning/afternoon/evening/night and how are you and respond if you say good or if you say bad. However, it has no link to video cameras in my house or an RFID tag reader or anything like that. Also, it has no voice recognition, but I would like to implement it if I get a new mic.

  23. Man, its like 1969, havnt you heard about pro hardware and software that intergrates all these features with 1000’s of plugins ?

    Homeseer / MainLobby / etc…

    It’s like starting from scratch something that will never reach 10% of what homeseer can already do today. We have been integrating home automation systems for years and beleive me, this is the basics… Altough I dont expect any type of mood matching or character emotion to be any USEFULL in the future. Talking to a PC is still today impressive but useless…

  24. Ok, first up, Mac OS is based on an edited Linux core. Secondly, even making a replica of the JARVIS System would be very hard. I myself only want an os that is made on the basis of JARVIS, but a whole house system would be awesome. There is a small way you could turn Windows XP/Vista/Seven into a JARVIS-styled desktop:

    1. Download and install the latest rainmeter
    2. Go to DeviantART and search in the box: ‘Rainmeter’ (without the quotes)
    3. download a few skins and try fusing them together to form an ironman skin… see what you can come up with…
    4. try to obtain a windows sound pack based on the voice of JARVIS. This shouldn’t be too hard…

    At the moment, my laptop is being fixed, so when I get it back, I will make a screenshot of my JARVIS rainmeter theme. If you wish to see, please email me: necron_lord_127 at hotmail dot com

    I will respond as soon as I have made it……(Won’t be for a few weeks yet….) :)

  25. Since my last post, I have been working on a new JARVIS System that works very nicely. Not a complete system like the one that guy made for his house, but my computer listens to me with my own custom commands, I can operate the computer via bluetooth on my phone, my phone can even remotely turn on my server at home and my computer even helps me with playing guitar. It uses its microphone and tells me if my guitar is out of tune.

  26. I would like to get a few people together to attempt to get an open source version, basically build a framework and brain for a system and allow people to add plug-ins on a dedicated website. Anybody interested in something like this? DeanoKidd95 looks to be doing well alone!

  27. Hi The David. Thank you for such kind words, and I have read your comment also. I am only 15 years old, but I would be glad to offer assistance in any and every way possible. So I am in for this, and I have a group of friends who are also very good with coding, wiring, circuitry and pc tech. I am in. Who else is???

  28. Cool… I have checked out this page, and like it alot… I have tried adding some new features since I upgraded my phone… now i control JARVIS with my phone over Wi-Fi, use Wi-Fi, GPS for tracking (so I can get a lift from my Google Latitude friends anytime) and a few more tidbits that you guys mite b interested in… :)

  29. I only had a crack at something like this for a bit of fun due to receiving a nice ironman helmet sculpt.

    in 2 nights i’ve managed to set up ver 0.1 which used a basic rainmeter skin and speach recog.

    Ver 0.2 was last night in which I added back up overlaying program e-speach and command lines for opening my websites, bringing up weather pages and news. I even got it to open my playlist and play a selection of my choice.

    But it’s a really like an atari st trying to be a playstation3. Until I can figure out how to make it more intellegent and get it to read out feeds and weather, mail messeges, i’ll just play with this version.

    “jarvis open skype and call Mark” — Jarvis say’s “Very well sir, opening Skype and calling Mark Smith”. – it even does it which is cool, but it requires a back up from speach rocog to choose the call setting.

    “jarvis, open weather” — Jarvis say’s “very well sir, bringing up local weather details in our area” – brings up a page for weather for where I live

    and my favorite so far.

    “jarvis, open media player and play my ironman playlist”.

    opens windows media and plays the song selection.

    I might add variations of each question so that if i come in and say jarvis playlist 1, it will do just that.

    I’ve zero programming experience but it was just fun to hear the laptop talking back.

    anyone know an easier way of getting it to call someoen just by saying call jack or whoever?

  30. Hows it goin guys? First id like to say thank you for having a thought to doing this build. I want a jarvis of my own! lol! I love the movie version. its incredible! i have a samsung galaxy s 2 , id really like to have jarvis on here lol. as well as my mac. when will i be able to have it?

  31. hello geniuses there! :)

    @jiraiya2point0 ; DeanoKidd95 & jarvis ,
    i’m a crazy techy-cum-gizmoholic, and now thinking of something very much smarter and advanced . . .
    so I want to ask you 3, from where did you all started this? and it would be my pleasure to work with you, especially you, DeanoKidd95.

    thanks.

    1. Hi, Jarvis here. We have actually already begun implementing and releasing our version under the name of Cyman. It is on Google Play for Android (Cyman Mark 2). In terms of advice, stay with a small domain, like weather. Don’t try to covetoo many bases at the same time.

  32. Hi.

    This post is to anyone (including you, Jarvis); any tips, and/or suggestions on where to start with DLA/DLAP? I know there’s chatbots out there (Ultra Hal), and Pandora Bots, but I’m wondering how I could adapt that, and use it to develop, build upon, and create my own DLA/DLAP? Maybe I’m just getting too ahead of myself at the moment.

    Peace

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