You are there in your home controlling the lights in your home without touching a switch, making phone calls and setting timers simply by speaking to a device. Nothing new, right? After all, anyone can have a voice assistant at home. Except that doing it in 1983 is a nice anticipation: so either you come from the future, or you are the "lucky" owner of a Mastervoice, an invention that anticipated many of the features that we take for granted today.
There was a magician and a programmer…
The story of the Butler In A Box begins with an inventor, visionary and (literally) magician, one Gus Searcy. In September 1983, Searcy and the former IBM programmer Franz Kavan they set to work on a computer that could combine remote control technology with computing power. As? Receiving and transmitting commands through voice. And, once programmed, perform various household tasks such as turning on and off lights, televisions, air conditioners and more.
They made it, and called it “Sidney”. In reality, Mastervoice, known to friends as “Butler In A Box” had just been born: the first voice assistant in history.
A “butler in a box”
This before-its-time voice assistant didn't just turn lights on and off without using a switch (although it could even set zones in individual rooms if the lights were connected to remote control modules). It could also make and receive phone calls, set timers, and could be paired with sensors that acted as security alarms.
All of this was triggered by a wake word, which in this case could be a traditional butler name such as Godfrey or Hobson. The device, in turn, called the user "boss", with the classic zeal of a subordinate.
Just like Alexa, Siri or any voice assistant today. Almost.
Of course, the Mastervoice wasn't exactly like the smart devices we have now. It wasn't connected to the Internet, for example. So no audio streaming, although it could be configured to turn on a radio. New users had to “train” the device to recognize the way they said key words like “light” or “phone.”
And, if you want to know one of the reasons why it failed, know that today we can buy a voice assistant for even 20 euros. A Mastervoice, on the other hand, cost almost $1.500 at the time. It would be around 3.500 euros each. Got the message, apple vision pro?
A step forward towards the smart home
Despite its not-so-mini size, high price, and technological limitations of the time, the Mastervoice was a big step forward in making homes smarter and developing technologies that could help people with disabilities live more independently.
In short, such a high-tech butler wouldn't be seen again for another 13 years until 1996, when Ask Jeeves was launched. Another story, maybe we'll talk about it again.
In the meantime, the next time you talk to your voice assistant, remember this device as big as a Playstation 5 and full of expectations, ahead of its time. If there is one thing that the history of technology teaches us, it is that the future always arrives sooner than we think. Only, as that guy says, it's often "badly distributed."
