Recently I’ve been seeing so many people talk about their “JARVIS” style assistants like they’re some kind of amazing genius. Sorry, but I’ve had a personal assistant running on my own hardware for years; hell, I had an assistant running the house before even OpenAI or the modern LLM era.
For those unaware of who or what a JARVIS is, JARVIS was Tony Stark/Iron Man’s AI assistant that helped run both his lab and his power armour. People fell in love with the British accent along with the user interface shown in the films, leading to people trying to recreate it.
I personally never liked the UI as much as other people did. I prefer something simple that can just send a text-based message or just a simple voice synth, which is why I decided it’s time to talk about Magdalene.
I’ve been working on this since 2017, long before anyone else was really thinking about it. People act like this is magical but it isn’t — this is just a script kiddy version of what’s been around this whole time.
Like, I get what people love about it, but at the same time I am getting fed up with people bragging about how they’re the first to make something like this, when really GitHub projects like OpenJarvis are not even remotely new.
I’ve talked about my assistant Mag/Magdalene in private chats for years but noticed I keep referencing this “Mag” in articles as far back as “Foamy Was Right About Smart Homes [Rant].” Well, I guess it’s time to talk about her creation.
Originally Mag was going to be called FILSS [pronounced Phil-us] and I ran her on a full ATX case that was black, which I called Sheila. Sheila held files and source code with FILSS processing everything. Now I am sure some readers are confused by this, so let me explain.
The name Sheila was taken from the same place as FILSS: the web series Red vs. Blue, a comedy series following two teams of simulation troopers from the UNSC set in the Halo universe.
Sheila was the name the AI took when it was implanted within an M808B Scorpion Tank, with FILSS as the brain of the system.
The brain/FILSS part of the system was originally an NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit.
Sadly I had to rename the brain of the system due to an issue I discovered with text-to-speech not liking the name FILSS, so that left me wondering “What do I call this?” I began thinking of names for the system for voice recognition.
I thought about how most AI assistant systems had names like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and so on. It took months of me trying names like “Beto” [Beatrice from Umineko], Tiffany [Tiffany Valentine], Amanda [Amanda Young]. Then, midway through coding, I thought of it: MAG. Now, some people assumed when I spoke I was saying Megan, like Megan Griffin or M3GAN, but no. The name for my AI assistant was taken from the best goth rock opera of all time.
Repo! The Genetic Opera’s Voice of GeneCo, Magdalene “Blind Mag” Defoe, played on film by the amazing Sarah Brightman.
Blind Mag was basically the former best friend of the main character Shilo’s dead mother, as well as Shilo’s godmother. I don’t wanna spoil Repo! The Genetic Opera for anyone, so I’d say just watch the film when you get the chance.
Let’s move back to talking about how Mag runs my apartment and keeps me productive.
Mag has read-only access to many things to prevent her from hallucinating and creating non-existent meetings.
Mag also has access to my media servers, fitness tracker, receipt email [a special inbox just for that purpose], food/grocery delivery, and other key infrastructure around the apartment.
Every morning Mag checks my RSS feeds, emails, calendar, and weather in multiple locations to give me an idea of what my day looks like.
The feature I love that I created was the ability for Mag to look through my media server and pick some music to wake me up to, ranging from “You’re The One For Me, Fatty” by Morrissey, “Californication” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Robert Ford (Sloth)” by American Murder Songs, to even “I.V.” by X Japan.
So there’s always something different. Really, one thing that makes Mag better than most AI assistants I’ve seen is the fact that I’m not dealing with vendor lock-in or model lock-in. If someday I upgrade to a better model, I can port the system over and bake in a whole new model.
Recently with the creation of MAG 7.4, I added the ability to use custom AI voices for different needs, such as having John Kramer [Tobin Bell] as my camera doorbell voice, Charles Lee Ray [Brad Dourif] as my VOIP server secretary, Lain Iwakura [Bridget Hoffman] voicing some of the alerts from the server. But the primary voice bank I use for MAG is the ever-talented Petrea Burchard as Ryoko Hakubi, since I am a sucker for the Tenchi franchise.
I am honestly tempted to start documenting new features as I add them to the system.
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