So, I'm Gus Searcy Thought you did a good job on the video but what you didn't know is there is a device called a rampak that you could plug in and store the memory for up to 7 years without having to change the battery and would restore the memory voice and all in 5 seconds
So the pin number is derived from an algorithm of the serial number and if anyone contacts me with their serial number I can give them the pin number they are not lost
I worked for Gus for a couple of years around 2001 and did installations, programming, and voice training sessions. It was ahead of its time and provided reasonable service when programmed by a trained technician. I once did a service call to a quadriplegic who could barely speak. It could be programmed to respond to nearly any sound the user could make as long as the user could repeat the sound consistently. He was able to make phone calls, control lights and TV, and also call his caregiver in another part of the house. It did lead the way to the Home Automation we enjoy today. Hi Gus!
That was a long time ago. I was a technician with the company that created the packaging for the Butler in a Box. It was very revolutionany for its time. I met Gus and was proud to work on the project. I will never forget the time I worked there. It was a magical time before most home computers. It did have it's issues but worked well enough for lots of people that could not get up and change the channel or turn on a light. And the voice training actually trained me how to speak better. That made it work better too. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
@@bubbleboy821 it was all digital encoding and they compared one word with the list of words. It was a bit more complicated than that but. If I told you I would have k... You 😜 Also, you can buy integrated circuits today that do it very cheap.
@@bubbleboy821 A combination of stage magic and late 70s early 80s low end speech technology. There were lots of people building stuff like this in the day. You typically had a "front end" that separated speech into anywhere from three to eight frequency bands of interest, and possibly measured the overall waveform energy and the zero crossing rate. Then a recognizer that ran a linear match over it all. (I wrote such a matching program in my teens in the 70s. Long story). Among the first of these to reach any kind of commercial success was "Speechlab" sold by "Heuristics, Inc." in 1977. The first version was a board for S-100 based computers like the "MITS Altair" or the "IMSAI". By 1979 hey Heuristics had launched one for the newfangled "Apple II" and teamed up with Tandy/Radio Shack to sell it as the "Voxbox" for TRS-80. Price was around $180 in 1977 money, or $900 today. One bold experimenter programmed an S100 computer, a Speechlab recognizer, a Votrax speech synthesizer, and an X10 controller board and built a home control system called "Breslin" that got on lots of TV shows and articles in "Popular Science", "Popular Electronics", "Science and Mechanics", etc. in the late 70s. Here's the late 70's "Popular Science" article: www.popsci.com/popular-science-breslin-home-computer-sytsem/ So, by 1983, what Butler in a Box did electronically was actually "old hat". What made BiB special was "stage magic". Speechlab-style recognizers couldn't recognize words at the phonetic level the way a modern recognizer could, nor could they understand them with a language model. They simply matched a sequence of sound to a label. And that's where the stage magic came in. If you simply tried to train "lamp on" and "lamp off" it would not work well, because the task of distinguishing between that trailing "n" and "f" was simply beyond a 1977 Speechlab-style recognizer. So Gus would train the user to train the recognizer to use "lamp on" and "off please" instead. Multisyllable phrases with no similarity to each other. He had a vocabulary of such phrases you could use to make your basic X-10 devices work. I did some similar stuff in the late 70s with the Speechlab and Voxbox. I created a "language" specifically designed with sounds that maximized the ability of a filter-bank + zero-crossing detector so that recognition was much more reliable than English. I called it... Klingonese (1. I was a nerd's nerd. 2. That's how they referred to the language in the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", with the "ese" on the end. 3. "Star Trek, The Motion Picture" had not yet given us our first taste of spoken Klingon). Well, you asked. Side note: around 1990 I had the opportunity to generate synthetic waveforms that you could train a recognizer with and determined what sort of front end it had. BiB appeared to have 3 filters and a zero-crossing detector. Basically a duplicate of Speechlab. Side note: there actually exists a language that, by pure coincidence, looks like it was designed for the primitive speech recognition systems of the 70s and 80s. It's called Japanese. I kid you not: it has a rhythmic structure and single consonant/vowel syllable type that looks like something constructed for speech recognition. Side note: It's 2024 now, and people have written better recognizers than BiB on arduinos, doing the front end and the X-10 generation in software so you can put together your own BiB for under $20.
@@bubbleboy821 I think it just recognizes peaks in the input pattern similarity when you look at your voice recording on audacity. Iam also looking for the answer to confirm that tho.
@@bubbleboy821 I think just compare your voice peaks with trained data. No AI no voice recognition nothing just compare. So if u had flue or u far aways from device, Butler doesn't recognize your voice and stay in silence.
In 1968, at age 16 I built an AI. It didn't do voice recognition, and didn't do anything fancy like turn on table lamps or TVs. It's input "commands" were ten pushbuttons. It's output "responses" were ten small panel lights. But it actually learned! When you gave it a command, it would give you up to ten different responses in sequence. If you pressed the "reward" switch, it would associate that command with that response. When you later gave it the same command, it would immediately give you the learned response. You could teach it the desired response for each of the ten commands. You could even teach it the same response for more than one command. (Like teaching a dog to sit when you told it "come" or "venga".) Unlike the Butler, turning it off did not make it forget it's learned responses. But it did have a "forget" switch which would clear all the learned responses. I thought it was a good electronic model of conditioned responses. Not bad for a kid who had never had a psychology class. I entered it in the school science fair. It won nothing because the judge for it was my Electronics teacher who was a former telephone company repairman who was fascinated by transistor Class A amplifier design, and my digital AI was all simple relays and telephone stepping relays. My classmate who won for his analog model of a single neuron was blown away by my project. But that's okay: Most of my career was embedded system programming like cellphones and modems. I even did the digital design verification on a four channel 100 MBPS DSL modem, and wrote the boot loader for a 256 core massively parallel processor before I retired.
@@Adenzel Plain old binary. People didn't make neural nets until recently because the processing speed for useful output wasn't there. It still isn't there... "AI" has a longer way to go than they let on.
Thats about 20 years before the first neural networks, 30 years before they reached the first mass market nerds, and 40 years before they started getting usefull.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that computing power (speed), RAM and ROM and all that 40 years ago was very slow and very very expensive. As a point of reference the average Smartwatch today has 125,000 times more memory than the butler in a box did, and no I'm not exaggerating! Also the average computer speed today is 3,800 times faster than the processing in the butler in a box 40 years ago. Yet despite those limitations it still did real time voice recognition and full human sounding digital speech which back then was unheard of.
@@TVCHLORDI don't know if this is a duplicate response or not but I didn't see it so I'm redoing it. When he said I got the price wrong he was right but for the wrong reason. Understand that back then electric typewriters sold for over $1,100. When I started selling the butler in a box I first sold it for 995 and we barely sold a neat because people did not believe it could do what we said for the price. We raise the price and we sold more when we got to $4,000 they couldn't be sold fast enough
You know I kind of misinformed you it's been a long time ago it was a Rockwell 6501 Q which is a brand new microprocessor that had just come out I was actually the first person to actually use it in a production product
Interesting choice: there were other SoC options at the time, but it looks like the R6501Q was particularly well suited for an-always on device. What do you recall as the driving factor in the use of the Rockwell CPU? Also, did the system have other additional ASICs or support chips (DSP, etc)?
no, it looks pretty 80s but thats not a bad thing, the ps5 is damn ugly, this looks more like a ps4/ps3 anyway but it REALLY resembles a ps2, not a modern console but a 2000s or early 2010s
As a point of clarification the pin number is derived from an algorithm of the serial number so if someone emails me their serial number I can give them the pin number they are not lost!
Have you considered releasing the algorithm, on say Github, so anyone can unlock the device many years from now? Cool invention that was ahead of its time, kudos
That's very kind of you. Can you tell me the algorithm ? I will create a little freeware utility that lets people enter their serial codes and returns the PIN number, and add it to my free software web page. It will save you having to do it.
@pplwizard1 "he algorithm will only work on computers that existed before the IBM XT at that time they changed the rounding protocol" - that's no worries, can easily write software to act the same on modern machines, and to make sure it works right, can test against the algorithm written into code on an old Apple ][ or PDP-11.
@@tbuk8350Yep, some JS on a web page would be ideal. Will definitely share the algorithm if I hear anything back (unless Gus says "do not share", which doesn't seem likely). Still hoping to hear from Gus, he seems like such a great guy who did some pretty amazing pioneering projects ...
You know what's funny? Even today, assistants like siri, google and alexa suck. They constantly misunderstand you, often times they activate accidentally and other times they just ignore you.
That really comes down to how you set up Alexa. There's an option to set up a voice ID so that Alexa can recognize your voice better and better over time, and it starts by having you read back certain phrases, etc. My home has over three dozen smart light switches, smart bulbs, smart outlets, smart blinds, connected thermostat, smart front door lock, etc. Alexa understands me perfectly 99.9% of the time. Every device/light has a specific name assigned to it. Alexa can turn them on and off, if it's a dimmer I can set the dimmer to a percentage, if there are colored smart bulbs I can set the color as well, I can open and close individual blinds or all of them via a group name, I can unlock or lock the front door (Alexa will ask you for a pin code before unlocking), since I have several echo units they can be used as intercoms by telling Alexa to "drop in", I can change the temperature on the thermostat or switch it from heating to cooling, continue my current audiobook, make an announcement to all the echo speakers, turn on ceiling fans and set the speed between low medium and high, setting multiple timers (each with its own name) while I'm in the kitchen, I connected AnyList to Alexa and I can add grocery items to my list by just telling Alexa, and then the grocery list is synchronized to everybody's phone, etc. I use these features every single day, multiple times per day. Alexa understands everything I say without issue almost all the time, and by that I mean that multiple days can go by without misunderstanding a single thing. So while at first the voice recognition may not be as good as expected, once the system has been trained over time to recognize your voice it becomes very good at doing so.
I don't think I've ever had an AI assistant misunderstand me. Most of the time it does, it's due to an accent, or the way people phrase the statement. I know my grandmother struggled with her Siri constantly because she'd keep trying to talk to it like a person, rather than working with it's limitations.
My father had a custom home built in SW Florida in early 2000. The house was put in the Parade of Homes . It was to market all the custom home builders in Southwest Florida at the time. The house won an award 2 years in a row. Custom home of the year and the most futuristic home. My father was a retired airline pilot. I grew up with all the cool tech stuff as a kid. There are still pictures of me and my younger brother putting together a Heathkit home computer back in the late 70's. Anyways when he had The Butler In a Box installed in the new house I remember all the Cat 5 wiring ran throughout the home. If I recall there was a switch board that all the Cat 5 ran to and the Butler plugged into that. We had everything connected to it. Even the pool pump and stereo system were connected. The coolest part of the system was being able to name it and purchase different voices for it. My dad called his Captain Kirk. It would say, "Yes, Master?" He would give the command of "Party Time." Then respond with, "Right Away." The drapes for the lanai were on motors and they would start to open. then next the fiber optic lighting for the pool and spa would turn on with the spa pump next. The dual Marantz rack system would turn on and start playing music. I loved bringing people over to show it off. What a cool house. We had the Radioshack X-10 back in the 80's. So he already understood the tech behind it.
if the house is complicated and unique enough, try and preserve it. that sounds like something that eventually becomes a historic place (obviously not now but in like 30-50 years newer architecture will have much more historical consideration (because it wont be new anymore) and most 70s-2000s era american residental architecture looks good enough to warrant preservation (not mcmansions though)
@@KippinCollars Cuz people would have have to go around and *gasp* actually communicate with other people! People not on their "friends" list or recommended by any source and -god- knows what could happen! possibly even spontinously raised voices, men "gazing" at women (and visa-versa...shhh), oh wait...they don't happen anymore. phew, I was startin to get anxiety.
@@DoublePlus-Ungood lol, yeah people disappoint me. A lot of people will argue that this weird fake “introvert” thing thing is really a mental health thing. It’s really a selfish coward thing.
@@KippinCollars For me it's a mental health thing. After over 20 years in the Army and retiring as a Master Sergeant, people irritate me. That is why I am now retired and live at the back end of a nice 25 acre wooded parcel the is connected to a state forest. I enjoy my solitude and no people LOL.
Honestly, this thing blew me away. I was expecting some expensive toy that did 10% of the things it promises, instead is legitely cutting-edge, ground-breaking stuff for its time. You can see how much thought and R&D went into the device: - An entire ecosystem of controllable devices that communicate over the power cables without the need of pulling new wires. - Possibility to integrate it with an house-wide speaker microphone system out of the box. - A lot of options for configuring the commands (way more than the ON/OFF I was expecting). - Option to interface it with a computer over common and widely used RS232. - High-end, quality components, if all that was need to make it work after 40 years was clean the contacts a bit and fix a broken solder joint. The capacitors on most consumer-grade electronics will start to fail in a couple of decades at most. - All data processing done locally, on the device itself (which actually makes it way smarter than any modern Amazon Echo or similar device as they do no computation at all besides recognising the activation word, all the voice recognition past that is done on remote servers). Maybe this thing was expensive, but not at all overpriced for what it had to offer.
Thank you for acknowledging the effort that went into this. Not only did it use X10, it used asci code over rs232 it also did infrared for video and music systems and DTMF to control and be controlled by telephones as well as dry contact closure to interface with alarm systems and other dry contact closure things like garage doors
@@sunny-vega This device was nothing an average household would have bought (too complicated and specialized). It for impaired people or the same digital luxury customers those nowadays would buy a gold plated smartwatch or a Pepper robot, or the type of tech geek hobbyists those pay thousands e.g. for model making.
I wonder how old the device actually is though, as it appears to have been on the market for more than 20 years. His unit likely wasn't one of the early 1980s units.
I still have a box full of MANY various X-10 modules including appliance modules, lamp modules, wireless pushbuttons, a couple of "computer modules", one of which was connected to my alarm system and another to a Linux box which ran my own software, PIRs, and a learning remote control. I automated my home with a system that dimmed out lights in rooms after I wasn't in them for a while, turned on the kettle and music when I got up... Shut everything down when I went to bed and woke me up in the morning. When my alarm went off, waving (to trigger the PIR in my bedroom) would cause it to snooze and it would not fully cancel until it detected me in the living room (at which point, it would turn on the kettle and music). It would shut down the house when I left (as I armed the alarm) and bring things back when I came home and it would turn on and off lights when I was away to mimic activity of someone being there. Even my doorbell was X-10 operated and it caused my system to make the StarTrek Next Gen Ready Room doorbell noise. I used it for a number of years, tweaking it and building on it... until I got married and my wife hated it because she kept switching off lights (at the normal light switch) when she left a room and couldn't break the habit.... and I hadn't written the code to cope with two people living there... Eventually, I decommissioned it, but I still have all of the hardware.
@@20.ma-at.t.23 - I custom-wrote it for my home and for my activities. At the time, I had trouble walking due to a spinal injury and the home-automation was an adaptation to my home to assist me. The same software would not necessarily suit someone else. As I said, my wife hated it because she did not know how to respond properly to it and preferred physical switches. I wrote the software, so I knew its idiosyncrasies and what each little sound it made, meant - most of the sounds we used were taken straight from StarTrek. If you were sitting still in the same room for a while, it would dim the lights down to about 50% until you moved. If you went to another room, it would bring on the lights in that room and eventually dim out the lights in the previous room, in stages. (There is some video on UA-cam of it doing its thing whilst my robot, Josie, roams around between the kitchen and the living-room during some software testing). It did cope with more than one person in the house (if you knew how to let it know that you were still occupying a room whilst someone else was in another - but again, my wife got frustrated with the lights dimming out on her if I was moving around in another room). I could probably have persevered with it and tweaked the software to be a little more "wife-friendly" but by the time I decommissioned it, I was managing a lot better with my injury and it wasn't quite so necessary for me to keep it running. Also, X-10 units had a high failure rate especially when a bulb blew - it would often take out the lamp-modules - as well as the ones which plug into the wall, I had the ones which went between a bulb and the light socket, and they were very prone to failure. X-10 modules were getting harder and harder to find and constant replacement was becoming troublesome. We also had our own control-system we called HECS which involved a 100 twisted-pair trunk which ran through the house for controlling appliances which we had taken off the X-10 network and we were slowly migrating to HECS from X-10. It was an interesting project and one I enjoyed playing around with but making a commercially-viable product from it would have been easier said than done and each installation would have had to have been custom-written. (FYI - "We" refers to myself and my other geek friends. The action of keeping a room "live" we called a "light-wave", we were also into 3D modelling at the time and one of our favourite ray-tracers was a piece of software, which was used in the production of StarTrek, called... LightWave).
this is honestly so inspiring, those little projects you can just have the satisfaction of doing it yourself and being able to control almost aspect exactly how you want and make it fully personal. sorry im going on a bit now i just loved reading that.
Darn it!! I wrote a long passage giving a load more detail about the system and why it would not really be commercially viable but UA-cam seems to have sent it into the abyss !!!
So i sent this to my father-in-law, who is Gus. He commented on this video. If you scroll down, he is the PPLwizard comment. It's so weird seeing the old house in this video.
Say hi to Gus from me, he's obviously a forward thinking fella. I made a telephone recording device that turned on when lifting handset, recorded the pulse number which was dialled, and recorded on handset lifting. Caught my mother cheating on my father in around 1983 as direct result. Sometimes our skill causes us pain, but anything revealing truth has tendency to do that.
At the time this thing came out, Radio Shack also had a home automation system which used the same rebranded modules. I bought a bunch of it when I was a teenager, and for less than $100 I could control lights and appliances all over the house. The only difference, besides the price, was that I used buttons and timers to control things, not my voice.
@@popularscience It also used the X10 format. RadioShack sold modules for the Black IBM Aptiva II (Pentium II 300 mhz) that allowed you to control your house using Windows 95 through either programming, or by voice using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. The computer was close to $1400, with 17" monitor, base module, and 2 lamp modules. The extra modules were something like $25 in 1996 and 97. I used to sell the mess out of them, and ended up inheriting a whole system that I had sold to my godsister.
@@popularscience it's called the x10 and it looks like a 1980s alarm clock until you flip out the dial. it doesn't have voice commands but LGR did a video on it a few years back
This video alone deserves more than 80 thousand subs. Absolutely fantastic research, editing and delivery, loved watching this and assumed you had several million subs ❤️
In 1989, when I was 14, I came across an article about Mastervoice in a Greek computer magazine in Athens. The device was mind-blowing and captured my imagination like nothing else, quickly becoming a cherished dream of mine. I longed to own one, but it was beyond my financial reach back then, and perhaps even now. The revolutionary capabilities and technology of Mastervoice left such a lasting impression on me that I never forgot it. As the years passed, I watched the evolution of speech recognition, always remembering Mastervoice as the pioneer of it all. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this device inspired me to study and become an electronic engineer and programmer. Even today, I continue to search for this device, and this is how I discovered this video. I have immense admiration for the inventor of Mastervoice (I now know his name at last "Gus Searcy") and the team behind it. I am truly grateful for the inspiration they provided, and I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.
@@popularscience Another sci-fi movie about home automation AI was "Electric Dreams" (1984). I wonder why "Butler in a Box" could not backup its RAM to a cassette recorder (like C64 datasette); even 1980th synths and good calculators had that feature. The power consumption is not that odd. I own a VHS recorder Philips VR-6880 (with internal small TFT) that eats 29W standby! These things were like leaving a C64 always on. A less complex (but still madly moonpriced) vintage smarthome device was the NuTone LBC55 (kind of door chime with digital clock, alarms etc.)
Actually it did have a backup he didn't read the manual there's a product called the ramp act that stored in restored the entire memory in 5 seconds and lasted for 7 years before you needed to change its battery @@cyberyogicowindler2448
@popularscience you should ask him about the legal battle with Microsoft, his crazy 6 year divorce court battle(went through 3 different judges), his weird deer goat on his animal farm.
Hi, I'm Gus Searcy.... as I mentioned earlier did a great job on the story I wish you would check with me first a couple things you missed one there was a thing called a rampak which is mentioned in the manual that stores and restores the entire memory in about 5 to 10 seconds holds it for 7 years and you can replace the battery for another 7 years. Also the pin number is an algorithmic calculation of the serial number and I do have the formula that will give the pin number to any unit that I have the serial number for. Lastly the reason the butler in a box did not continue is more bizarre than anything you could begin to imagine and it isn't even close to the reasons that you think. Do you want to contact me I'll tell you the story but I can't put it here.
RS-232 is a data protocol and not a connector type. That port was for DB9 Subminiature connectors. And as a commercial AV installation technician who has been working in house of worship, education, and corporate office installation environments for nearly a decade, I can tell you that DB9s and RS-232 control are still extremely common today-especially in Crestron systems.
yep, still use 232 in a few critical systems that just can't be or is too expensive to build a whole solution for. DB9 cables didn't fail as much as it seem to be the case today and you knew what to expect as far as orientation and rx/tx signals reliability. We can repin and repurpose cables as needed.
If you're going to get all pedantic, the connector is a DE-9. A DB-9 would be much bigger. The "D-subminiature" shell comes in 5 sizes: DE, DA, DB, DC, and DD (smallest to largest). The "E" is the smallest because when they first came up with these connectors they didn't think they needed anything smaller than the A. They were wrong. You most often see "normal density" two-row connectors, where a DB has 25 pins and a DE has 9. DE-9 is common for RS-232, RS-485, and lower-resolution analog monitors. With three rows of the smaller "high density" pins the DB carries 44 pins and the DE carries 15. That DE-15 is your classic "VGA" connector. There's an even finer size where the DB carries 52 and the DE has 19. The DD shell has 3 rows at normal density for 50 pins and 4 rows at high and double density for 100 pins. I had to solder a few dozen of those back around 1985. Not fun.
You asked "How was anyone but the most hardcore tech enthusiast supposed to navigate 134 pages of this decades before average people were even used to having home computers?" The answer was "you weren't". Mastervoice relied on a distributor/installer network. You normally bought your BiB through one of those folks, who would earn their share of the pie by coming in, installing, BiB, activating it, setting up your X10 modules, naming your devices, etc.
Thanks! I am actually surprised by his comment to be honest. He calls himself an 80s kid and says the manual of 134 pages was a challenge. Ridiculous! We too were 80s kids and had VCR manuals, Tape Deck Manuals, and a 100 other manuals for things that were far less complicated and far more thicker! And we would read, understand and use. This guy just seems lazy! 😁
Thank you for the fascinating ghost story! My Brother built a business of home automation around these. He recently passed away and I found three of them in his basement. The one he had used in his home system, and then ripped out, and two more NEW and FULLY complete, in their boxes. I found that eBay ad that you purchased yours from and after failing to find more info or something to do with them, I gave them to GoodWill. I still have a large box of used X-10s.
I can't believe this doesn't have more views! The whole video style is super professional and I never heard of the Butler before! I can't believe it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, not even a footnote! Surely that's bound to change once this video blows up.
hey kim, I really hope someone ends up making a Wikipedia page, the Butler deserves it! And thank you for what you said about the video style, I've passed that on to our video editor (who is AMAZING)
In 1994 I had a house full of X-10 devices. There was software that I ran on an "old" 486 PC that would do the voice recognition and send X-10 commands using a string of interfaces. I could barely get it to work when I spoke directly into the microphone, so I quickly abandoned this idea and turned the computer into a webcam that would dial-in to the Internet and upload a single image every 30 minutes.
@@marwerno I have trained the wife to be direct. "Husband, it is hot in here" "Wife, yes, I agree with you" "Husband, please open window" "Yes, I can help with that" I am make her form a complete sentence, in exchange to manual labor on my part. I have no sympathy for the "Do I have to spell it out for you?" . . . Everyone that has over a 100 word vocabulary is required to use words to communicate ideas. I should not have to pick up the slack for you being mentally and verbally lazy. Need to show the wife she is heard and understood, but still waiting for direction.
This made me think of the old movie Electric Dreams, that I watched as a kid on tv in the 80s. Great movie about a guy who buys a home computer with a microphone who controls everything in his home, makes coffee and toast in the morning, and controls the lock on the front door. Then one day he spills his coffee on the motherboard, and it awakens.... I wonder if the movie was inspired by this product.
No. But the product and the movie were made because people were still inspired to 'think outside the box' and try the best they could. And sometimes you might get something that actually works and sells well.
I made a security system in the 80s using 8 track players and ultrasonic detectors that called up to 4 phones numbers using the touchtone keypad phone lines. Also, made a phone patch linking my home phone to my CB radio in my van.
I lived in a house that was built in the 80's with a security system that had a reel to reel 8 track tape inside the control panel. We never used it because in the early 2000's it was either broken or obsolete. I wonder if it was one of your systems. 🤔
In 1982 I was already deep into the X-10 ecosystem. The rep firm I worked for had a sample closet. In the closet I found a product called SpeechLab. It came with a cheap little microphone, a interface card designed for a slot in the Apple ][, and a cassette tape with operating software. Long story short, I connected all the devices to my Apple ][ and the X-10 controller to the serial port. It was a long process, but I think speechlab would (after training) recognize about 15 words. Now all I had to do was modify the basic program on the cassette to output the recognized text to my translator program which contained all of the possible keywords. The program would then sent the appropriate commands to the X-10 controller through the serial port and voila. The biggest downside is that it didn't have a trigger phrase. You had to push a button to make it start to listen. I had a great time with this and "amazed all my friends"
Just an FYI, X10 was hot shit back then and in fact X10 still exists today (I assume in present day they must sell a bluetooth or wifi bridge, it'd be crazy to still be making this technology and not have it controllable from the phone.). I remember on the Atari 8-bit either ANTIC or Analog (Atari magazines) or possibly Compute! (they'd cover all the 8-bit systems) had an article, you could hook a piece of hardware up to the joystick port and it'd "bit bang" the X10 protocol out to do the computer's bidding, and AFAIK they had ways to connect it up to almost all the 8-bit systems. That said the setup I recall seeing for the 8-bit Atari was just to get it interfaced, I think they expected you to write up a little BASIC program to print up "1. Lamp 2. Stereo" etc,and flip on the right X10 device when you hit 1, 2, etc. This thing is pretty slick, and amazing for 1983 technology.
I remember seeing the "Butler in a Box" at a computer convention when I was 10 years old. The presenter at the booth had a lapel mic with a loud speaker and the device would get the commands right about 50% of the time. When the device got it wrong, the presenter would say something like "No" or "Stop" and the device would respond back something like "I am sorry, Master" that would always get a big laugh reaction from the crowd. The booth was always packed with back to back demos going on. My dad got me into the convention and then went to to work. I stayed at the booth and saw the demo over and over for a few hours. Seeing the "Butler in a Box" in person was just unbelievable. The fact that you could talk to a computer reminded me a lot of the 80's show "Whiz Kids" who had a computer (Ralf) that could talk... I thought that was just impossible, yet here we are. Many (many) years later, with the arrival of the new home assistants (Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, etc.) people kept talking about how revolutionary this was... I kept thinking "Well, isn't this what I saw at that computer show like 20 years ago?". I was never able to find any reference to that tech/device anywhere. At some point I though, "I was just a little kid, maybe that was not real, maybe I just imagined the whole thing, maybe that machine did not actually exist". Today that changes. The "Butler in a Box" did exist, it did actually allow you to control lamps with your voice... back in the 80s. This is amazing, it brings back such good memories! Thank you for posting this video.
Hello, I loved your comment. So I got some news for you. I was the guy you saw demonstrating in the booth all those many years ago. And yes it was very real.
Around 2002 to 2003 (maybe?) I worked with a company called Vocollect and their Talkman system. It worked very much like this but it was a headset. People used it in warehouses so they could use both hands for moving stuff around. Instead of training it to respond to things like "lamp on" you trained it to recognize "next", "pick 3" or "repeat". It worked really well for a very small subset of commands.
A friend and I had something similar about the same time. It doesn't recognise words, it recognises specific sound patterns. Thats why each user needs to train it on their voice and the language spoken doesn't matter. One application was a voice activated lock that only responded to the specific sound of your voice. No one else could open it even if they knew the phrase. It may have been the first biometric lock.
I remember X10. I had a bunch of them, but used a universal remote to turn things on and off. It worked with an alarm system, fans, & even a window A/C unit. A friend of mine's dad had X10 throughout his entire home in the early 90s. It was pretty popular with geeks and Radio Shack carried all sorts of accessories.
The fact that "the volume was low" was the "broken" part of the speakers is such an insanely humbling experience. Even working IT for almost 12 years, I didn't think that a device this old would have a problem with a solution that simple.
15:39 - The first rule of electrical engineering is plug the bloody thing in. The second rule of electrical engineering is turn the bloody thing on. The third rule of electrical engineering is if it smokes, turn it off, un-plug it, and get coffee. Now I need I need a 2A rule: move the volume control to at least half-way...
It really shows how hard it was to pull off some of the most practical elements (data storage, power backup, etc) with all this early tech, and how impossibly expensive it would've been solve those problems from the beginning
A quick Google search says the first 3.5 inch hard drive was released in 1983 for about $1900 (or $4500 today). There was no flash memory back then, or at least none that you could write to in real time. Using a computer with no hard drive means your only way to save data was to a floppy disk.
Ok but the butler was not really dead,just the version you had created,you had to create a new one then.unlike when you lost the pin code,then it game over,right?
You have to remember the time period. The first computers back then, that had hard drives, came with a wopping 10MB or 20MB hard drive that had a rather big size, was quite heavy and made a lot of noise. There were no USB drives or even any way to permanently store user data on a chip at the time. The most common "permanent" storage option was cassette tapes. I'm not sure why this was not an option for this device but it's easy to look at history with all the knowledge we have today and laugh. You also have to consider the target market for this device. It was obviously aimed at the rich and powerful who had other means of keeping their homes powered during blackouts and also had a lot of staff on hand to set up a device like this. I doubt the average middle class person would have wasted so much time and money on this when they could just get up and turn the lights on themselves.
Actually he got that part wrong he didn't read the whole manual. There is a device called a rampak that went with it that could be plugged and unplugged from the back and would store all the memory voice and everything permanently for up to 7 years and then you could replace the battery in it for another 7 years and so on.
Thanks, hunter -- the conclusions tend to write themselves as we get deeper and deeper into a topic. That always works out better than deciding what point you want to make before you write up a video
If you're ONLY feeling happy or only feeling cynical about innovative tech, you're probably missing something. The best tech and science stories are filled with promise and skepticism, excitement and worry, answers and questions
Amazing device! Speaking of cost and modules we should agree that today you STILL need to connect every device with module and have microphones in every room !!!
Thank you! I won one on eBay today for $150 ish and will study and experiment with it. Google Gemini Advanced and Amazon Alexa user and a sucker for retro-futurism!
@@SilverSpoon_Yea and if Googel thing you say somthing it start to spy even more Many times i sit att hom alone nad Googel start to say i dident cahtch taht or like no you dont have ice cream home ...
@@SilverSpoon_ You could build your own if you wanted, if you want to avoid spying. With arduino and built-in Windows Speech recognition, it's pretty easy. I built a rudimentary one a few years ago like that.
@@Here_is_Waldo i already have a server at home that does more for me. all of these things should be offline but it pays itself on the spying. that's the reason why it's evil but no one seems to understand the real value of their data.
this was by far one of the best, clear, amusing old tech reviews i have been fortunate enough to come across, what makes it even better is the fact that the Wizard himself is both still alive and just casually walked into the comment section. golden.
I honestly feel like with updated technology that still doesn't require Bluetooth or WiFi it would be a great option for a device that couldn't be hacked and secretly used to listen to you. Probably not enough demand for something like that though, everyone expects smart tech to use the Internet.
How did I only just now have UA-cam recommend this channel to me? I never even _thought_ to see if Popular Science had a UA-cam channel before, but then BAM! It recommends me your excellent Captain Power video and I checked this one out too; instantly subscribing! I don't get it; I *love* content like this. Creators like CRD: The Cathode Ray Dude, and Ken from Computer Clan are so good at wrapping up tales of tech with great history lessons and stories about the people behind these efforts, and this is right in that same wheelhouse. Bad algorithm, bad; you should've pointed me towards Popular Science earlier! 😄 Fantastic work; I may not have ever heard of this before, but I'm certainly glad to have been schooled on the Butler in a Box now! Thank you.
The BSR/carrier-current lamp modules were $9.95 as I recall. The relay-based appliance modules had a big relay in them and cost $14.95. Radio Shack sold them for a little more.
I guarantee it will get a Wikipedia page now. Good on you for giving some love to an obscure precursor to commonplace technology we all take for granted now.
@@popularscience oh, no complaints. I meant that sincerely. Kevin has some of the best research for his topics that I've seen ever on pretty much every video he makes. He's really amazing.
In about the same, 1983, Mattel electronics made a speech recognition device for the TI-99/4a home computer. Combined with the speech capabilities of the TI, it made for a very immersive experience in the games that supported it. I'll bet the Butler in a Box used the same basic components for speech recognition. The X11 wireless standard for controlling devices still lives today, making any working Butler in a Box still useful... at least with a large UPS attached for power outages.
I’m 22.. X10 ran my whole house when I was really young. I remember messing around with it when I was 5 and making random things light up or turn on in different rooms. We didnt have anything like this as the controller tho.. the main controller looked like a sort of souped up clock thing to program each address.. no need for this voice activated complication lol. The whole system ran really well and was incredibly ahead of its time.
You are unacceptably underrated. The editing is awsome and the structure of the videos is to dream of! I cant believe that videos like this doesnt get picked up by the youtube algorythm. Videos like this deserve to get millions of views. Keep up the good work
Thanks, Pedro, it is really nice to hear all that. Hopefully the algorithm gets friendlier soon -- and in the meantime, we'll be putting out a new video every week, so subscribe if you like what you see!
I’m blown away. I have just cleared out my attic with 20 or so different X-10 modules and the commander. I threw out telephone cables (RJ15) and I’m pretty sure I tossed all of it. Want me to look?
this video is honestly amazing i would expect this quality of content from a yt channel with over 4 mil subs but you only have 88k unheard of in my book you just earned a new sub keep it up
Uh, if you didn't notice those control "modules" were available off the shell at Radio Shack and they were not $36 each. I have a BOX of them down the basement along two of the brain units (the Mini Control Center box with the switches to turn the lights on and off).
8:39 it actually seems pretty simple, if you want to select the first letter next to a number, press a1 and the number, a2 for the second, a3, and so on...
I could not for the life of me figure out how such a device could have possibly worked that long ago. The realization that it doesn't even need to know language, but "just" needs to compare samples with stored ones, was a humbling one. Actually ingenious. Rather ironic that compared to this device, the way people use modern voice assistants is really not that much more elaborate.
I'm blown away! All the hassle was worth it, just to see that lamp turn *ON* in the end. Seeing that in 1987 would've been like stumbling upon one of *"Stranger Things'"* big reveals in your own hometown, in real life; the excitement, the wonder, the mystery, the IMPLICATIONS!! I'm inspired JUST by that lamp, alone. It makes me wonder... What's our government hiding?
there must be paradoxical technology that exacerbates the problem it's meant to solve well, mobile phones have done that to some degree, connecting us efficiently while sometimes encouraging isolation
Best Hacker Movie: The Demon Seed: An “autonomous artificial intelligence program” that hacks its developer’s house then hacks his wife to bear a child.😅 a favorite x-tweet
7:06 no, he has not spent 8 years. It is literally written in the description of the picture that you share, "For as little time as I've had with the Butler". What else did you make up?
Isn't it funny how the devices that made big promises they couldn't really deliver on, cost a ton more money adjusted for inflation, and never quite worked right somehow generate nostalgia?? It's like we understood how hard they were trying to make us happy
This was a very nice introduction to many not familiar with the butler device. The presentation style and topic were both interesting. However, perhaps for story building or for theatrical reasons you appear to have dropped the ball on the technology as mentioned by some commenters and, more importantly, by the actual inventor chiming in. It was a technical topic, but you either need to "level up" your knowledge here or ask people with the necessary expertise to review your presentation before posting it. Also, read the whole manual, please. It reflects poorly on you and your channel if you do not. Nonetheless, I enjoyed your presentation very much and will subscribe to your channel. 😊👍
Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing back popular science or at least bringing it to my attention. I was a reader of the magazine when I was a kid. Looking forward to great videos to come.
This was my first video of this channel and i have to say, congrat's on making an amazing video. It's vomprehensive, well structured and even managed to use the right music at the right moments, which is somehow still a rarity. Well then, i'm gonna sub now and hope to see more video's about obscure old tech nobody remembers! :D
16:14 This 23W isn't anything by pre-2000 standards. When "Energy Star" was pushed out in the late 90s, the Astroturf-roots community (of profit-minded corpos) decried it, for instructing every maker of electronics to use the commonly available options to save power in some standard ways. My c.1998 Cambridge Acoustics PC speakers originally had a weighty (transformer based) power block that used about 10W, by itself. Now I have a 36W switched power supply (large cap, for acoustics) plugged into it, that uses under 1W. I don't think switched power supplies were around before 1996, everything used a "wall wart" or had a heavy transformer built-in. If you wanted to run this Antique Alexa, you could determine the power rail voltage(s) and replace whatever it had with a modern supply. This would eliminate 50-90% of the wasted electricity. The primary change across everything, was switching from transformer-based power supplies, to "switching" power supplies around 1998. A friend has a Bose A/V 5.1 Surround system (basic bookshelf little speakers) from 2004, that consumes 25-35W continuously when off. I tried creating an external switching system to cut its supply since he only uses it a few hours a week, but it takes 2 minutes to do some internal indexing and loading whenever the power is lost. This BOSE system is the newest (last) consumer item I know of to have this sort of waste. By 2010, 65W-90W (laptop) power supplies were under $10. An easy point of reference to remember, is that each Watt of vampire power drain for something sitting idle, costs around $1 per year. So in 10 years since I swapped the power supply for my PC speakers, the $10 (or so) power supply has saved me around $100, which is twice what the speakers cost new (on sale). By 2010, there was only one thing in the modern home still stealing from you. THE CABLE BOX. In an extension of their business model, the cable boxes used in the transition to digital cable were lightweight computers that stole electricity. Most were ON 24/7 and took 20-45W continuously to power, with DVRs being the higher wattage. Supposedly this is better now, as they always say "those are the old boxes we are phasing out" but then they went full digital and required a box at every TV in the home.. I don't know. A lot was said about LEDs saving power, but you don't leave lights on all the time.. Well, back in the 1980s and 1990s people did have more money, and rent was cheaper, and my porch light in 2000 did not even have a switch. It just stayed on, always. I eventually put a Philips florescent on it saving 80%, but mostly because the bulb died every month randomly. Society was really really slow in America, to legislate little tweaks that cut the waste of electricity. These vampire losses are really expensive. If you have an older refrigerator, from 1980, it may use 1500 kWh per year (or more if its failing). A 2000 model used 800-1100. A new model uses 500-800. This means a dying old fridge may cost you 1000kWh per year, or $150. A window AC might waste $50-200 cooling, if its not running well, versus a high efficiency model. The savings on electricity will buy the new unit in a couple years.
I was a big fan of X10 devices back in the day. There was an interface for PCs that allowed me to program my Christmas displays. I remember that you needed a bridge to go between the two 110V halves of your breaker box. They are still around today!
This video is truly amazing. Sensitively curious about a very unexpected story of a person. Totally agree on the first move penalty. Something that really makes me wonder is: how they did that in hardware, since at least a part of it should be analog, no digital processor from 1983 was capable of comparing waveforms in realtime. Then the skyrocketed price over 20 yrs (?!). Why? And what about the original team considering no piece of info is online (I would expect to see a number of pieces of information proportional to the people involved). And by the way, it worked! Of course you cannot compare to SiriGPT, but the vision and idea was there already. Amazing! (I like many such pieces of tech from early 80s, for example the first tv wristwatch 😅). Was good? Hell no, but cool indeed, have a look around
Thank you for sharing this device with us and for all the research you put into this video. I remember a nonvoice house control that used what looked like the same plug-in modules that this system used. The other system was from Radio Shack and was controlled by the TRS-80 and a home control cartridge that allowed the setup and automation of devices, like turning on the coffee pot at 6:00 am or running the lights to make it look like someone was home. Keep up the fine work.
Thank you so much for the great presentation. Truth be told, those of us born in the Dawn of information age read all of those manuals in order to have innovation. I feel those experiences were both instructive and liberating. We could feel proud to have conquered those nearly impossible user manuals and had bragging rights. Ever assemble a swing set? A waterbed? An entertainment system? Those instructions always introduced new "inventive" fasteners that failed and Glue was vastly improved to account for just the failures. One had to lay out all the bolts, screws, of various sizes...all structures, all according to the diagrams, on the carped and then read-read- and re-read the instructions before ever turning the first screw. Wow! I am an Engineer now, but I almost failed at my first major project back in 1996, of assembling my daughters massive Swing set. I had it almost assembled when I realized I mis-identified one of the major structures for a slightly shorter version and wound up having to tear it almost completely down in order to correct my mistake. Live and learn. "A picture is worth a Million words...unless you discover that its labels and instruction and are only in Japanese"(DDP).
It's not an AI machine, it's a voice recognition device. In the early 1980s, such tools had to be trained using sentences containing all syllables and sounds over time to recognize the speaker's intonation as well. Because of this, as you mentioned, there is no meaning to the speaker's language. Today, tools such as Siri, Google and Alexa are already more developed, so they can recognize speech even without training, but sometimes they have errors that happen mainly from background noise. After voice recognition, it is possible to run all sorts of applications, etc., including artificial intelligence engines.
Voice command software and the machines of that era all required a lengthy training period. As I recall, Alexa has a voice training mode as well. And even though Alexa or other voice command software now rely on servers over the Internet to complete a task, they still mess up. That thing did it all as a self-contained machine. I think you're allowing your current world view of how things should work cloud your expectations of how things in the past should work.
In the demo at the end I was impressed with how responsive the system was and how natural the voice actually sounded. I guess they used samples for it instead of a synthesized voice?
Well done! Your points at the end about how many trailblazers do all the hard work and don't get the payoffs is really pretty sad. I think TiVo is another example of this. They made something so groundbreaking for the home consumer that it became a verb for recording a show at home. Then cable companies started offering DVR's and that really hurt TiVo. TiVo will always have a soft spot in my heart though. I was one of those folks who bought it when it first came out...$600 and it recorded a whopping 4 hours of content in high quality mode. Ahhh, how far we've come!
In the early-mid 80's I worked on a Dragon voice recognition system for a paraplegic friend, and it was a complete 286 computer all by itself in a normal PC occupying a 16 bit slot, I don't remember if it spoke, but it had pages of 16 command words that it compared to voice samples to run computer programs, it didn't understand anything without many training sessions, and it was only for one user.
This is Amazing!! I've got to find one of these!! I've been trying to figure out how to voice-control my X-10 system for YEARS and haven't found out a way that wouldn't cost thousands of dollars. I have a GE Homeminder, which is fantastic, but being able to control my home with my voice is a Star Trek dream come true. I love everything about this - the vacuum florescent display, the voice, the programming (which honestly the instruction sread in the video didn't seem very confusing), and the design is gorgeous! Totally sleek - I love it. My home is filled with X-10 devices right now, and they work as well today as they did 40 years ago. And the best part is, I don't have to rely on some sort of bluetooth or internet connected device like Alexa or Google listening to my every word. The Butler In A Box is absolutely brilliant, and I hope I can find one soon! Thanks for the great video, and thank you Gus Searcy for such a forward-thinking invention!
You can probably voice control your X-10 system with a Raspberry Pi handling the voice processing (looks like the raspbian-ovos project would work?) and an X-10 Firecracker (CM17A RS-232 to X-10 RF) module. Might need a USB-to-RS232 module (or an Arduino with the CM17A library).
So, I'm Gus Searcy
Thought you did a good job on the video but what you didn't know is there is a device called a rampak that you could plug in and store the memory for up to 7 years without having to change the battery and would restore the memory voice and all in 5 seconds
So the pin number is derived from an algorithm of the serial number and if anyone contacts me with their serial number I can give them the pin number they are not lost
So this thing looks awesome visually. Did you design the look yourself? What was your inspiration?
The legend 😲
I am disabled and it is modern systems which these kind of innovations allowed me and still do allow me to live independently.
I worked for Gus for a couple of years around 2001 and did installations, programming, and voice training sessions.
It was ahead of its time and provided reasonable service when programmed by a trained technician.
I once did a service call to a quadriplegic who could barely speak. It could be programmed to respond to nearly any sound the user could make as long as the user could repeat the sound consistently. He was able to make phone calls, control lights and TV, and also call his caregiver in another part of the house.
It did lead the way to the Home Automation we enjoy today. Hi Gus!
That was a long time ago. I was a technician with the company that created the packaging for the Butler in a Box. It was very revolutionany for its time. I met Gus and was proud to work on the project. I will never forget the time I worked there. It was a magical time before most home computers. It did have it's issues but worked well enough for lots of people that could not get up and change the channel or turn on a light. And the voice training actually trained me how to speak better. That made it work better too. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
How did he achieve voice recognition with the Butler?
@@bubbleboy821 it was all digital encoding and they compared one word with the list of words. It was a bit more complicated than that but. If I told you I would have k... You 😜
Also, you can buy integrated circuits today that do it very cheap.
@@bubbleboy821 A combination of stage magic and late 70s early 80s low end speech technology. There were lots of people building stuff like this in the day. You typically had a "front end" that separated speech into anywhere from three to eight frequency bands of interest, and possibly measured the overall waveform energy and the zero crossing rate. Then a recognizer that ran a linear match over it all. (I wrote such a matching program in my teens in the 70s. Long story).
Among the first of these to reach any kind of commercial success was "Speechlab" sold by "Heuristics, Inc." in 1977. The first version was a board for S-100 based computers like the "MITS Altair" or the "IMSAI". By 1979 hey Heuristics had launched one for the newfangled "Apple II" and teamed up with Tandy/Radio Shack to sell it as the "Voxbox" for TRS-80. Price was around $180 in 1977 money, or $900 today. One bold experimenter programmed an S100 computer, a Speechlab recognizer, a Votrax speech synthesizer, and an X10 controller board and built a home control system called "Breslin" that got on lots of TV shows and articles in "Popular Science", "Popular Electronics", "Science and Mechanics", etc. in the late 70s. Here's the late 70's "Popular Science" article:
www.popsci.com/popular-science-breslin-home-computer-sytsem/
So, by 1983, what Butler in a Box did electronically was actually "old hat". What made BiB special was "stage magic". Speechlab-style recognizers couldn't recognize words at the phonetic level the way a modern recognizer could, nor could they understand them with a language model. They simply matched a sequence of sound to a label. And that's where the stage magic came in. If you simply tried to train "lamp on" and "lamp off" it would not work well, because the task of distinguishing between that trailing "n" and "f" was simply beyond a 1977 Speechlab-style recognizer. So Gus would train the user to train the recognizer to use "lamp on" and "off please" instead. Multisyllable phrases with no similarity to each other. He had a vocabulary of such phrases you could use to make your basic X-10 devices work.
I did some similar stuff in the late 70s with the Speechlab and Voxbox. I created a "language" specifically designed with sounds that maximized the ability of a filter-bank + zero-crossing detector so that recognition was much more reliable than English. I called it... Klingonese (1. I was a nerd's nerd. 2. That's how they referred to the language in the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", with the "ese" on the end. 3. "Star Trek, The Motion Picture" had not yet given us our first taste of spoken Klingon).
Well, you asked.
Side note: around 1990 I had the opportunity to generate synthetic waveforms that you could train a recognizer with and determined what sort of front end it had. BiB appeared to have 3 filters and a zero-crossing detector. Basically a duplicate of Speechlab.
Side note: there actually exists a language that, by pure coincidence, looks like it was designed for the primitive speech recognition systems of the 70s and 80s. It's called Japanese. I kid you not: it has a rhythmic structure and single consonant/vowel syllable type that looks like something constructed for speech recognition.
Side note: It's 2024 now, and people have written better recognizers than BiB on arduinos, doing the front end and the X-10 generation in software so you can put together your own BiB for under $20.
@@bubbleboy821 I think it just recognizes peaks in the input pattern similarity when you look at your voice recording on audacity. Iam also looking for the answer to confirm that tho.
@@bubbleboy821 I think just compare your voice peaks with trained data. No AI no voice recognition nothing just compare. So if u had flue or u far aways from device, Butler doesn't recognize your voice and stay in silence.
In 1968, at age 16 I built an AI. It didn't do voice recognition, and didn't do anything fancy like turn on table lamps or TVs. It's input "commands" were ten pushbuttons. It's output "responses" were ten small panel lights. But it actually learned! When you gave it a command, it would give you up to ten different responses in sequence. If you pressed the "reward" switch, it would associate that command with that response. When you later gave it the same command, it would immediately give you the learned response.
You could teach it the desired response for each of the ten commands. You could even teach it the same response for more than one command. (Like teaching a dog to sit when you told it "come" or "venga".) Unlike the Butler, turning it off did not make it forget it's learned responses. But it did have a "forget" switch which would clear all the learned responses. I thought it was a good electronic model of conditioned responses. Not bad for a kid who had never had a psychology class.
I entered it in the school science fair. It won nothing because the judge for it was my Electronics teacher who was a former telephone company repairman who was fascinated by transistor Class A amplifier design, and my digital AI was all simple relays and telephone stepping relays. My classmate who won for his analog model of a single neuron was blown away by my project. But that's okay: Most of my career was embedded system programming like cellphones and modems. I even did the digital design verification on a four channel 100 MBPS DSL modem, and wrote the boot loader for a 256 core massively parallel processor before I retired.
That's pretty wild for 1968 and being a kid at the time. Was it basically a rudimentary neural net or something completely different???
You gotta do a video on this invention of yours!
@@Adenzel Plain old binary. People didn't make neural nets until recently because the processing speed for useful output wasn't there. It still isn't there... "AI" has a longer way to go than they let on.
Thats about 20 years before the first neural networks, 30 years before they reached the first mass market nerds, and 40 years before they started getting usefull.
@@michaelhoudecki3657 The first neural net was built in 1957 and the work leading up to it started in the early 1940s.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that computing power (speed), RAM and ROM and all that 40 years ago was very slow and very very expensive. As a point of reference the average Smartwatch today has 125,000 times more memory than the butler in a box did, and no I'm not exaggerating! Also the average computer speed today is 3,800 times faster than the processing in the butler in a box 40 years ago. Yet despite those limitations it still did real time voice recognition and full human sounding digital speech which back then was unheard of.
It’s really cool to see you, the original creator, in the comments here sharing insights. Thanks for dropping in!
you're a legend! literally thirty years ahead in voice recognition!
why did you change the price from affordable to insane
@@TVCHLORDI don't know if this is a duplicate response or not but I didn't see it so I'm redoing it. When he said I got the price wrong he was right but for the wrong reason. Understand that back then electric typewriters sold for over $1,100. When I started selling the butler in a box I first sold it for 995 and we barely sold a neat because people did not believe it could do what we said for the price. We raise the price and we sold more when we got to $4,000 they couldn't be sold fast enough
I just subscribed by seeing you the creator actually comment hats off to you sir mad respect great vid 👏
You know I kind of misinformed you it's been a long time ago it was a Rockwell 6501 Q which is a brand new microprocessor that had just come out I was actually the first person to actually use it in a production product
thanks gus 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
99 to 100.
Interesting choice: there were other SoC options at the time, but it looks like the R6501Q was particularly well suited for an-always on device. What do you recall as the driving factor in the use of the Rockwell CPU?
Also, did the system have other additional ASICs or support chips (DSP, etc)?
The industrial design of the Butler was way ahead of its time. It still looks great today. It looks like a modern game console.
Anything with a VFD instantly gets a +1 sexy from me.
It's too bad the VFD clock display is so small. It would've made a cool desktop clock/alarm/fm radio (if it also had a built-in fm tuner and alarm).
Watch an episode or two of Star Trek the Next Generation and Note the computer interface featured on most desktops.
It legitimately does, I absolutely love how it looks. Anything with a VFD display wins my heart over immediately.
no, it looks pretty 80s but thats not a bad thing, the ps5 is damn ugly, this looks more like a ps4/ps3 anyway but it REALLY resembles a ps2, not a modern console but a 2000s or early 2010s
As a point of clarification the pin number is derived from an algorithm of the serial number so if someone emails me their serial number I can give them the pin number they are not lost!
Have you considered releasing the algorithm, on say Github, so anyone can unlock the device many years from now? Cool invention that was ahead of its time, kudos
That's very kind of you. Can you tell me the algorithm ? I will create a little freeware utility that lets people enter their serial codes and returns the PIN number, and add it to my free software web page. It will save you having to do it.
@pplwizard1 "he algorithm will only work on computers that existed before the IBM XT at that time they changed the rounding protocol" - that's no worries, can easily write software to act the same on modern machines, and to make sure it works right, can test against the algorithm written into code on an old Apple ][ or PDP-11.
@@MoosesValley I second this, whatever the algorithm is, I can rewrite it in JavaScript and create a little web utility that returns the PIN.
@@tbuk8350Yep, some JS on a web page would be ideal. Will definitely share the algorithm if I hear anything back (unless Gus says "do not share", which doesn't seem likely). Still hoping to hear from Gus, he seems like such a great guy who did some pretty amazing pioneering projects ...
You know what's funny? Even today, assistants like siri, google and alexa suck. They constantly misunderstand you, often times they activate accidentally and other times they just ignore you.
yeah, but at least ios 17 made siri activate on accident way less, and you could now mention "siri" in a conversation, without it triggering.
That really comes down to how you set up Alexa. There's an option to set up a voice ID so that Alexa can recognize your voice better and better over time, and it starts by having you read back certain phrases, etc. My home has over three dozen smart light switches, smart bulbs, smart outlets, smart blinds, connected thermostat, smart front door lock, etc. Alexa understands me perfectly 99.9% of the time. Every device/light has a specific name assigned to it. Alexa can turn them on and off, if it's a dimmer I can set the dimmer to a percentage, if there are colored smart bulbs I can set the color as well, I can open and close individual blinds or all of them via a group name, I can unlock or lock the front door (Alexa will ask you for a pin code before unlocking), since I have several echo units they can be used as intercoms by telling Alexa to "drop in", I can change the temperature on the thermostat or switch it from heating to cooling, continue my current audiobook, make an announcement to all the echo speakers, turn on ceiling fans and set the speed between low medium and high, setting multiple timers (each with its own name) while I'm in the kitchen, I connected AnyList to Alexa and I can add grocery items to my list by just telling Alexa, and then the grocery list is synchronized to everybody's phone, etc. I use these features every single day, multiple times per day. Alexa understands everything I say without issue almost all the time, and by that I mean that multiple days can go by without misunderstanding a single thing. So while at first the voice recognition may not be as good as expected, once the system has been trained over time to recognize your voice it becomes very good at doing so.
i think thats the complete opposite of what you just said@@decmant
I don't think I've ever had an AI assistant misunderstand me. Most of the time it does, it's due to an accent, or the way people phrase the statement. I know my grandmother struggled with her Siri constantly because she'd keep trying to talk to it like a person, rather than working with it's limitations.
@@Here_is_Waldo Meanwhile I'm here with Siri sometimes refusing to work even when I spell the words one by one
My father had a custom home built in SW Florida in early 2000. The house was put in the Parade of Homes . It was to market all the custom home builders in Southwest Florida at the time. The house won an award 2 years in a row. Custom home of the year and the most futuristic home. My father was a retired airline pilot. I grew up with all the cool tech stuff as a kid. There are still pictures of me and my younger brother putting together a Heathkit home computer back in the late 70's. Anyways when he had The Butler In a Box installed in the new house I remember all the Cat 5 wiring ran throughout the home. If I recall there was a switch board that all the Cat 5 ran to and the Butler plugged into that. We had everything connected to it. Even the pool pump and stereo system were connected. The coolest part of the system was being able to name it and purchase different voices for it. My dad called his Captain Kirk. It would say, "Yes, Master?" He would give the command of "Party Time." Then respond with, "Right Away." The drapes for the lanai were on motors and they would start to open. then next the fiber optic lighting for the pool and spa would turn on with the spa pump next. The dual Marantz rack system would turn on and start playing music. I loved bringing people over to show it off. What a cool house. We had the Radioshack X-10 back in the 80's. So he already understood the tech behind it.
if the house is complicated and unique enough, try and preserve it. that sounds like something that eventually becomes a historic place (obviously not now but in like 30-50 years newer architecture will have much more historical consideration (because it wont be new anymore) and most 70s-2000s era american residental architecture looks good enough to warrant preservation (not mcmansions though)
Parade of Homes, lol. I remember those! Why don't they have them anymore?
@@KippinCollars Cuz people would have have to go around and *gasp* actually communicate with other people! People not on their "friends" list or recommended by any source and -god- knows what could happen! possibly even spontinously raised voices, men "gazing" at women (and visa-versa...shhh), oh wait...they don't happen anymore. phew, I was startin to get anxiety.
@@DoublePlus-Ungood lol, yeah people disappoint me. A lot of people will argue that this weird fake “introvert” thing thing is really a mental health thing. It’s really a selfish coward thing.
@@KippinCollars For me it's a mental health thing. After over 20 years in the Army and retiring as a Master Sergeant, people irritate me. That is why I am now retired and live at the back end of a nice 25 acre wooded parcel the is connected to a state forest. I enjoy my solitude and no people LOL.
Honestly, this thing blew me away.
I was expecting some expensive toy that did 10% of the things it promises, instead is legitely cutting-edge, ground-breaking stuff for its time.
You can see how much thought and R&D went into the device:
- An entire ecosystem of controllable devices that communicate over the power cables without the need of pulling new wires.
- Possibility to integrate it with an house-wide speaker microphone system out of the box.
- A lot of options for configuring the commands (way more than the ON/OFF I was expecting).
- Option to interface it with a computer over common and widely used RS232.
- High-end, quality components, if all that was need to make it work after 40 years was clean the contacts a bit and fix a broken solder joint. The capacitors on most consumer-grade electronics will start to fail in a couple of decades at most.
- All data processing done locally, on the device itself (which actually makes it way smarter than any modern Amazon Echo or similar device as they do no computation at all besides recognising the activation word, all the voice recognition past that is done on remote servers).
Maybe this thing was expensive, but not at all overpriced for what it had to offer.
Thank you for acknowledging the effort that went into this. Not only did it use X10, it used asci code over rs232 it also did infrared for video and music systems and DTMF to control and be controlled by telephones as well as dry contact closure to interface with alarm systems and other dry contact closure things like garage doors
I think so too, 15k price tag for a full set-up. I mean, in 1983, having Hall3000, I would'Ve paid that
@@sunny-vega This device was nothing an average household would have bought (too complicated and specialized). It for impaired people or the same digital luxury customers those nowadays would buy a gold plated smartwatch or a Pepper robot, or the type of tech geek hobbyists those pay thousands e.g. for model making.
I wonder how old the device actually is though, as it appears to have been on the market for more than 20 years. His unit likely wasn't one of the early 1980s units.
I would compare it to a modern high end vr setup with haptic gloves and other accessories.
I still have a box full of MANY various X-10 modules including appliance modules, lamp modules, wireless pushbuttons, a couple of "computer modules", one of which was connected to my alarm system and another to a Linux box which ran my own software, PIRs, and a learning remote control.
I automated my home with a system that dimmed out lights in rooms after I wasn't in them for a while, turned on the kettle and music when I got up... Shut everything down when I went to bed and woke me up in the morning. When my alarm went off, waving (to trigger the PIR in my bedroom) would cause it to snooze and it would not fully cancel until it detected me in the living room (at which point, it would turn on the kettle and music). It would shut down the house when I left (as I armed the alarm) and bring things back when I came home and it would turn on and off lights when I was away to mimic activity of someone being there. Even my doorbell was X-10 operated and it caused my system to make the StarTrek Next Gen Ready Room doorbell noise.
I used it for a number of years, tweaking it and building on it... until I got married and my wife hated it because she kept switching off lights (at the normal light switch) when she left a room and couldn't break the habit.... and I hadn't written the code to cope with two people living there... Eventually, I decommissioned it, but I still have all of the hardware.
Typical female taking the joy out of a man's life.
@@20.ma-at.t.23 - I custom-wrote it for my home and for my activities. At the time, I had trouble walking due to a spinal injury and the home-automation was an adaptation to my home to assist me. The same software would not necessarily suit someone else. As I said, my wife hated it because she did not know how to respond properly to it and preferred physical switches. I wrote the software, so I knew its idiosyncrasies and what each little sound it made, meant - most of the sounds we used were taken straight from StarTrek. If you were sitting still in the same room for a while, it would dim the lights down to about 50% until you moved. If you went to another room, it would bring on the lights in that room and eventually dim out the lights in the previous room, in stages. (There is some video on UA-cam of it doing its thing whilst my robot, Josie, roams around between the kitchen and the living-room during some software testing). It did cope with more than one person in the house (if you knew how to let it know that you were still occupying a room whilst someone else was in another - but again, my wife got frustrated with the lights dimming out on her if I was moving around in another room).
I could probably have persevered with it and tweaked the software to be a little more "wife-friendly" but by the time I decommissioned it, I was managing a lot better with my injury and it wasn't quite so necessary for me to keep it running. Also, X-10 units had a high failure rate especially when a bulb blew - it would often take out the lamp-modules - as well as the ones which plug into the wall, I had the ones which went between a bulb and the light socket, and they were very prone to failure. X-10 modules were getting harder and harder to find and constant replacement was becoming troublesome. We also had our own control-system we called HECS which involved a 100 twisted-pair trunk which ran through the house for controlling appliances which we had taken off the X-10 network and we were slowly migrating to HECS from X-10.
It was an interesting project and one I enjoyed playing around with but making a commercially-viable product from it would have been easier said than done and each installation would have had to have been custom-written.
(FYI - "We" refers to myself and my other geek friends. The action of keeping a room "live" we called a "light-wave", we were also into 3D modelling at the time and one of our favourite ray-tracers was a piece of software, which was used in the production of StarTrek, called... LightWave).
Your wife killed your best friend :(
this is honestly so inspiring, those little projects you can just have the satisfaction of doing it yourself and being able to control almost aspect exactly how you want and make it fully personal. sorry im going on a bit now i just loved reading that.
Darn it!!
I wrote a long passage giving a load more detail about the system and why it would not really be commercially viable but UA-cam seems to have sent it into the abyss !!!
So i sent this to my father-in-law, who is Gus. He commented on this video. If you scroll down, he is the PPLwizard comment. It's so weird seeing the old house in this video.
That's cute
Whoah
Say hi to Gus from me, he's obviously a forward thinking fella. I made a telephone recording device that turned on when lifting handset, recorded the pulse number which was dialled, and recorded on handset lifting. Caught my mother cheating on my father in around 1983 as direct result. Sometimes our skill causes us pain, but anything revealing truth has tendency to do that.
That's cool! Did you ever have a Biab?
@madeleine.7044 we have one. Just not connected. Brand new in a box. But there are newer, more moderen options.
At the time this thing came out, Radio Shack also had a home automation system which used the same rebranded modules. I bought a bunch of it when I was a teenager, and for less than $100 I could control lights and appliances all over the house. The only difference, besides the price, was that I used buttons and timers to control things, not my voice.
That's awesome, do you remember what it was called?
@@polusdroopMy parents heard of that...
@@popularscience It also used the X10 format. RadioShack sold modules for the Black IBM Aptiva II (Pentium II 300 mhz) that allowed you to control your house using Windows 95 through either programming, or by voice using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. The computer was close to $1400, with 17" monitor, base module, and 2 lamp modules. The extra modules were something like $25 in 1996 and 97. I used to sell the mess out of them, and ended up inheriting a whole system that I had sold to my godsister.
Yup, same for me but I did have a speech synth and voice recognition add on for my TRS-80 that worked when IT wanted too ;-)
@@popularscience it's called the x10 and it looks like a 1980s alarm clock until you flip out the dial. it doesn't have voice commands but LGR did a video on it a few years back
This video alone deserves more than 80 thousand subs. Absolutely fantastic research, editing and delivery, loved watching this and assumed you had several million subs ❤️
In 1989, when I was 14, I came across an article about Mastervoice in a Greek computer magazine in Athens.
The device was mind-blowing and captured my imagination like nothing else, quickly becoming a cherished dream of mine.
I longed to own one, but it was beyond my financial reach back then, and perhaps even now.
The revolutionary capabilities and technology of Mastervoice left such a lasting impression on me that I never forgot it.
As the years passed, I watched the evolution of speech recognition, always remembering Mastervoice as the pioneer of it all.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that this device inspired me to study and become an electronic engineer and programmer.
Even today, I continue to search for this device, and this is how I discovered this video.
I have immense admiration for the inventor of Mastervoice (I now know his name at last "Gus Searcy") and the team behind it.
I am truly grateful for the inspiration they provided, and I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you for the kind words... I wish you ever success.
That ending went hard af. Great video
it's amazing what you start to think and feel when you get deep into a piece of old tech and the people who invented it
@@popularscience Another sci-fi movie about home automation AI was "Electric Dreams" (1984). I wonder why "Butler in a Box" could not backup its RAM to a cassette recorder (like C64 datasette); even 1980th synths and good calculators had that feature. The power consumption is not that odd. I own a VHS recorder Philips VR-6880 (with internal small TFT) that eats 29W standby! These things were like leaving a C64 always on. A less complex (but still madly moonpriced) vintage smarthome device was the NuTone LBC55 (kind of door chime with digital clock, alarms etc.)
Actually it did have a backup he didn't read the manual there's a product called the ramp act that stored in restored the entire memory in 5 seconds and lasted for 7 years before you needed to change its battery @@cyberyogicowindler2448
my man gus really did it all 💀
Gus Searcy has one of the wildest stories ever, and a lot of it checks out
Bro really completed his side missions
@@MtFoxtas you should!
@popularscience you should ask him about the legal battle with Microsoft, his crazy 6 year divorce court battle(went through 3 different judges), his weird deer goat on his animal farm.
Hi, I'm Gus Searcy.... as I mentioned earlier did a great job on the story I wish you would check with me first a couple things you missed one there was a thing called a rampak which is mentioned in the manual that stores and restores the entire memory in about 5 to 10 seconds holds it for 7 years and you can replace the battery for another 7 years. Also the pin number is an algorithmic calculation of the serial number and I do have the formula that will give the pin number to any unit that I have the serial number for. Lastly the reason the butler in a box did not continue is more bizarre than anything you could begin to imagine and it isn't even close to the reasons that you think. Do you want to contact me I'll tell you the story but I can't put it here.
RS-232 is a data protocol and not a connector type. That port was for DB9 Subminiature connectors. And as a commercial AV installation technician who has been working in house of worship, education, and corporate office installation environments for nearly a decade, I can tell you that DB9s and RS-232 control are still extremely common today-especially in Crestron systems.
yep, still use 232 in a few critical systems that just can't be or is too expensive to build a whole solution for. DB9 cables didn't fail as much as it seem to be the case today and you knew what to expect as far as orientation and rx/tx signals reliability. We can repin and repurpose cables as needed.
All you need are pins 2, 3, and 7 baby!@@Kattakam
It's not a protocol! It's a signalling standard.
And technically it's TIA-232.
Also, it's DE-9, not DB-9.
If you're going to get all pedantic, the connector is a DE-9. A DB-9 would be much bigger. The "D-subminiature" shell comes in 5 sizes: DE, DA, DB, DC, and DD (smallest to largest). The "E" is the smallest because when they first came up with these connectors they didn't think they needed anything smaller than the A. They were wrong.
You most often see "normal density" two-row connectors, where a DB has 25 pins and a DE has 9. DE-9 is common for RS-232, RS-485, and lower-resolution analog monitors. With three rows of the smaller "high density" pins the DB carries 44 pins and the DE carries 15. That DE-15 is your classic "VGA" connector. There's an even finer size where the DB carries 52 and the DE has 19. The DD shell has 3 rows at normal density for 50 pins and 4 rows at high and double density for 100 pins. I had to solder a few dozen of those back around 1985. Not fun.
Dont forget RS422 -
You asked "How was anyone but the most hardcore tech enthusiast supposed to navigate 134 pages of this decades before average people were even used to having home computers?" The answer was "you weren't". Mastervoice relied on a distributor/installer network. You normally bought your BiB through one of those folks, who would earn their share of the pie by coming in, installing, BiB, activating it, setting up your X10 modules, naming your devices, etc.
My HP-48SX programmable calculator came with a far thicker manual than this! Also some of my music keyboards had big manuals.
Thanks! I am actually surprised by his comment to be honest. He calls himself an 80s kid and says the manual of 134 pages was a challenge. Ridiculous! We too were 80s kids and had VCR manuals, Tape Deck Manuals, and a 100 other manuals for things that were far less complicated and far more thicker! And we would read, understand and use. This guy just seems lazy! 😁
Thank you for the fascinating ghost story! My Brother built a business of home automation around these. He recently passed away and I found three of them in his basement. The one he had used in his home system, and then ripped out, and two more NEW and FULLY complete, in their boxes. I found that eBay ad that you purchased yours from and after failing to find more info or something to do with them, I gave them to GoodWill. I still have a large box of used X-10s.
Can I contact you? I would like to have one.
Same here on the X10's. On my to-ebay list but never quite getting there.
Bro the end was so epic. This is the kind of videos i love.
the tech and the topics write the endings on their own
I can't believe this doesn't have more views! The whole video style is super professional and I never heard of the Butler before! I can't believe it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, not even a footnote! Surely that's bound to change once this video blows up.
Same. And imagine how many more of these things we haven't heard of.
hey kim, I really hope someone ends up making a Wikipedia page, the Butler deserves it! And thank you for what you said about the video style, I've passed that on to our video editor (who is AMAZING)
Click the Like button, then UA-cam will show it to more people
@@popularsciencecheck ur UA-cam comments, gus replied
In 1994 I had a house full of X-10 devices. There was software that I ran on an "old" 486 PC that would do the voice recognition and send X-10 commands using a string of interfaces. I could barely get it to work when I spoke directly into the microphone, so I quickly abandoned this idea and turned the computer into a webcam that would dial-in to the Internet and upload a single image every 30 minutes.
My wife has voice commands working perfectly.
"Husband, please turn off the lights"
Yes, it even has error correction built in... but wifey mind is not easy to read 😅
@@marwerno I have trained the wife to be direct.
"Husband, it is hot in here"
"Wife, yes, I agree with you"
"Husband, please open window"
"Yes, I can help with that"
I am make her form a complete sentence, in exchange to manual labor on my part.
I have no sympathy for the "Do I have to spell it out for you?" . . . Everyone that has over a 100 word vocabulary is required to use words to communicate ideas. I should not have to pick up the slack for you being mentally and verbally lazy.
Need to show the wife she is heard and understood, but still waiting for direction.
lol..My wife thinks i'm a butler in her box
This made me think of the old movie Electric Dreams, that I watched as a kid on tv in the 80s. Great movie about a guy who buys a home computer with a microphone who controls everything in his home, makes coffee and toast in the morning, and controls the lock on the front door. Then one day he spills his coffee on the motherboard, and it awakens.... I wonder if the movie was inspired by this product.
No. But the product and the movie were made because people were still inspired to 'think outside the box' and try the best they could. And sometimes you might get something that actually works and sells well.
I made a security system in the 80s using 8 track players and ultrasonic detectors that called up to 4 phones numbers using the touchtone keypad phone lines. Also, made a phone patch linking my home phone to my CB radio in my van.
I lived in a house that was built in the 80's with a security system that had a reel to reel 8 track tape inside the control panel. We never used it because in the early 2000's it was either broken or obsolete. I wonder if it was one of your systems. 🤔
I only installed a few systems in South Carolina.
In 1982 I was already deep into the X-10 ecosystem. The rep firm I worked for had a sample closet. In the closet I found a product called SpeechLab. It came with a cheap little microphone, a interface card designed for a slot in the Apple ][, and a cassette tape with operating software. Long story short, I connected all the devices to my Apple ][ and the X-10 controller to the serial port. It was a long process, but I think speechlab would (after training) recognize about 15 words. Now all I had to do was modify the basic program on the cassette to output the recognized text to my translator program which contained all of the possible keywords. The program would then sent the appropriate commands to the X-10 controller through the serial port and voila. The biggest downside is that it didn't have a trigger phrase. You had to push a button to make it start to listen. I had a great time with this and "amazed all my friends"
Just an FYI, X10 was hot shit back then and in fact X10 still exists today (I assume in present day they must sell a bluetooth or wifi bridge, it'd be crazy to still be making this technology and not have it controllable from the phone.). I remember on the Atari 8-bit either ANTIC or Analog (Atari magazines) or possibly Compute! (they'd cover all the 8-bit systems) had an article, you could hook a piece of hardware up to the joystick port and it'd "bit bang" the X10 protocol out to do the computer's bidding, and AFAIK they had ways to connect it up to almost all the 8-bit systems.
That said the setup I recall seeing for the 8-bit Atari was just to get it interfaced, I think they expected you to write up a little BASIC program to print up "1. Lamp 2. Stereo" etc,and flip on the right X10 device when you hit 1, 2, etc.
This thing is pretty slick, and amazing for 1983 technology.
X10 is still supported in Home Assistant. I think ZWave had X10 backwards compatibility too?
I remember seeing the "Butler in a Box" at a computer convention when I was 10 years old. The presenter at the booth had a lapel mic with a loud speaker and the device would get the commands right about 50% of the time. When the device got it wrong, the presenter would say something like "No" or "Stop" and the device would respond back something like "I am sorry, Master" that would always get a big laugh reaction from the crowd. The booth was always packed with back to back demos going on. My dad got me into the convention and then went to to work. I stayed at the booth and saw the demo over and over for a few hours. Seeing the "Butler in a Box" in person was just unbelievable. The fact that you could talk to a computer reminded me a lot of the 80's show "Whiz Kids" who had a computer (Ralf) that could talk... I thought that was just impossible, yet here we are. Many (many) years later, with the arrival of the new home assistants (Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, etc.) people kept talking about how revolutionary this was... I kept thinking "Well, isn't this what I saw at that computer show like 20 years ago?". I was never able to find any reference to that tech/device anywhere. At some point I though, "I was just a little kid, maybe that was not real, maybe I just imagined the whole thing, maybe that machine did not actually exist". Today that changes. The "Butler in a Box" did exist, it did actually allow you to control lamps with your voice... back in the 80s. This is amazing, it brings back such good memories! Thank you for posting this video.
Hello, I loved your comment. So I got some news for you. I was the guy you saw demonstrating in the booth all those many years ago. And yes it was very real.
Around 2002 to 2003 (maybe?) I worked with a company called Vocollect and their Talkman system. It worked very much like this but it was a headset. People used it in warehouses so they could use both hands for moving stuff around. Instead of training it to respond to things like "lamp on" you trained it to recognize "next", "pick 3" or "repeat".
It worked really well for a very small subset of commands.
HEY Pittsburgh! I was an FAE for a distributor helping those guys
A friend and I had something similar about the same time. It doesn't recognise words, it recognises specific sound patterns. Thats why each user needs to train it on their voice and the language spoken doesn't matter. One application was a voice activated lock that only responded to the specific sound of your voice. No one else could open it even if they knew the phrase. It may have been the first biometric lock.
Heuristics Speechlab? (Or RadioShack Voxbox, which was based on Speechlab?)
Ah, yes. Good fun, but didn't work if you had a cold.
I remember X10. I had a bunch of them, but used a universal remote to turn things on and off. It worked with an alarm system, fans, & even a window A/C unit. A friend of mine's dad had X10 throughout his entire home in the early 90s. It was pretty popular with geeks and Radio Shack carried all sorts of accessories.
This was very interesting! Appreciate all your dad and dad's buddy went through to get rhis running to show us all.
So - Boomers are still a valuable resource (in some situations)
@ellayararwhyaych4711 - Every generation has its rise and fall. You will, too.
The fact that "the volume was low" was the "broken" part of the speakers is such an insanely humbling experience. Even working IT for almost 12 years, I didn't think that a device this old would have a problem with a solution that simple.
15:39 - The first rule of electrical engineering is plug the bloody thing in. The second rule of electrical engineering is turn the bloody thing on. The third rule of electrical engineering is if it smokes, turn it off, un-plug it, and get coffee. Now I need I need a 2A rule: move the volume control to at least half-way...
Daaamn, no permanent data storage is a bummer
It really shows how hard it was to pull off some of the most practical elements (data storage, power backup, etc) with all this early tech, and how impossibly expensive it would've been solve those problems from the beginning
A quick Google search says the first 3.5 inch hard drive was released in 1983 for about $1900 (or $4500 today). There was no flash memory back then, or at least none that you could write to in real time. Using a computer with no hard drive means your only way to save data was to a floppy disk.
Ok but the butler was not really dead,just the version you had created,you had to create a new one then.unlike when you lost the pin code,then it game over,right?
You have to remember the time period. The first computers back then, that had hard drives, came with a wopping 10MB or 20MB hard drive that had a rather big size, was quite heavy and made a lot of noise. There were no USB drives or even any way to permanently store user data on a chip at the time. The most common "permanent" storage option was cassette tapes. I'm not sure why this was not an option for this device but it's easy to look at history with all the knowledge we have today and laugh. You also have to consider the target market for this device. It was obviously aimed at the rich and powerful who had other means of keeping their homes powered during blackouts and also had a lot of staff on hand to set up a device like this. I doubt the average middle class person would have wasted so much time and money on this when they could just get up and turn the lights on themselves.
Actually he got that part wrong he didn't read the whole manual. There is a device called a rampak that went with it that could be plugged and unplugged from the back and would store all the memory voice and everything permanently for up to 7 years and then you could replace the battery in it for another 7 years and so on.
This is a very well constructed video essay. The sign off and conclusion was very well written.
Thanks, hunter -- the conclusions tend to write themselves as we get deeper and deeper into a topic. That always works out better than deciding what point you want to make before you write up a video
The end almost made me cry with happy -sad feeling..I was feeling super excited everytime you mentioned the "problems" with the device..
If you're ONLY feeling happy or only feeling cynical about innovative tech, you're probably missing something. The best tech and science stories are filled with promise and skepticism, excitement and worry, answers and questions
underrated channel with fantastic research and great storytelling. keep it coming
Amazing device! Speaking of cost and modules we should agree that today you STILL need to connect every device with module and have microphones in every room !!!
I never even heard of this channel. But Kevin hosting it is all I need.
Hey Catherine -- there will be a new video every week. A weekly dose of Popular. A weekly dose of Science. A weekly dose of Kevin.
Thank you! I won one on eBay today for $150 ish and will study and experiment with it. Google Gemini Advanced and Amazon Alexa user and a sucker for retro-futurism!
The butler sounds better than google
yes, because it works entirely off-line and it's not spying on you.
@@SilverSpoon_Yea and if Googel thing you say somthing it start to spy even more
Many times i sit att hom alone nad Googel start to say i dident cahtch taht or like no you dont have ice cream home ...
@@SilverSpoon_😂😂😂
@@SilverSpoon_ You could build your own if you wanted, if you want to avoid spying. With arduino and built-in Windows Speech recognition, it's pretty easy. I built a rudimentary one a few years ago like that.
@@Here_is_Waldo i already have a server at home that does more for me. all of these things should be offline but it pays itself on the spying. that's the reason why it's evil but no one seems to understand the real value of their data.
this was by far one of the best, clear, amusing old tech reviews i have been fortunate enough to come across, what makes it even better is the fact that the Wizard himself is both still alive and just casually walked into the comment section. golden.
I honestly feel like with updated technology that still doesn't require Bluetooth or WiFi it would be a great option for a device that couldn't be hacked and secretly used to listen to you. Probably not enough demand for something like that though, everyone expects smart tech to use the Internet.
How did I only just now have UA-cam recommend this channel to me? I never even _thought_ to see if Popular Science had a UA-cam channel before, but then BAM! It recommends me your excellent Captain Power video and I checked this one out too; instantly subscribing! I don't get it; I *love* content like this. Creators like CRD: The Cathode Ray Dude, and Ken from Computer Clan are so good at wrapping up tales of tech with great history lessons and stories about the people behind these efforts, and this is right in that same wheelhouse. Bad algorithm, bad; you should've pointed me towards Popular Science earlier! 😄
Fantastic work; I may not have ever heard of this before, but I'm certainly glad to have been schooled on the Butler in a Box now! Thank you.
Wow... I watched the WHOLE thing... all at once, and was captivated.
Good show, sir.
lol for real, nobody ever hooks me like this
The BSR/carrier-current lamp modules were $9.95 as I recall. The relay-based appliance modules had a big relay in them and cost $14.95. Radio Shack sold them for a little more.
Wikipedia has now added The Butler to the Virtual Assistant page. Only gave it one sentence though. Your video resurrected this lost technology.
It also has its own wikipedia page now.
I guarantee it will get a Wikipedia page now.
Good on you for giving some love to an obscure precursor to commonplace technology we all take for granted now.
Who got chills from this video?
if thinking about retro tech and future tech doesn't give you chills, you're not going deep enough
Lol thats my father. Weird seeing videos about stuff like this.
Wow, amazing video!
That was insanely entertaining and educational.
That's the blend we're going for, so thank you! Also, if you have a complaint, you are allowed to lodge 1objection.
@@popularscience oh, no complaints. I meant that sincerely. Kevin has some of the best research for his topics that I've seen ever on pretty much every video he makes. He's really amazing.
In about the same, 1983, Mattel electronics made a speech recognition device for the TI-99/4a home computer. Combined with the speech capabilities of the TI, it made for a very immersive experience in the games that supported it. I'll bet the Butler in a Box used the same basic components for speech recognition. The X11 wireless standard for controlling devices still lives today, making any working Butler in a Box still useful... at least with a large UPS attached for power outages.
I’m 22.. X10 ran my whole house when I was really young. I remember messing around with it when I was 5 and making random things light up or turn on in different rooms.
We didnt have anything like this as the controller tho.. the main controller looked like a sort of souped up clock thing to program each address.. no need for this voice activated complication lol.
The whole system ran really well and was incredibly ahead of its time.
You are unacceptably underrated. The editing is awsome and the structure of the videos is to dream of! I cant believe that videos like this doesnt get picked up by the youtube algorythm. Videos like this deserve to get millions of views. Keep up the good work
Thanks, Pedro, it is really nice to hear all that. Hopefully the algorithm gets friendlier soon -- and in the meantime, we'll be putting out a new video every week, so subscribe if you like what you see!
@@popularsciencei'm surprised you havent gotten 100k subscribers yet.. the editing of your vídeos is so good
I’m blown away. I have just cleared out my attic with 20 or so different X-10 modules and the commander. I threw out telephone cables (RJ15) and I’m pretty sure I tossed all of it. Want me to look?
You could probably make a pretty penny by eBaying it all. Good luck
Amazing video! Keep up the work, the algorithm gods will smile upon you in time 🙏
Every morning at the break of dawn we give a burnt offering to the Algorithm, may our prayers one day be answered
Man, you are the new vSauce, really. I hope you get viral. Great story telling
this video is honestly amazing i would expect this quality of content from a yt channel with over 4 mil subs but you only have 88k unheard of in my book you just earned a new sub keep it up
Uh, if you didn't notice those control "modules" were available off the shell at Radio Shack and they were not $36 each. I have a BOX of them down the basement along two of the brain units (the Mini Control Center box with the switches to turn the lights on and off).
This thing is more advanced than the Alexa, because it doesn't need internet/servers
Here from VSauce! This is great. I bet @technologyconnections would love this
There's also a really interesting channel called 'techmoan' if you are interested 👍
WE LOVE ALEC
8:39
it actually seems pretty simple, if you want to select the first letter next to a number, press a1 and the number, a2 for the second, a3, and so on...
I could not for the life of me figure out how such a device could have possibly worked that long ago. The realization that it doesn't even need to know language, but "just" needs to compare samples with stored ones, was a humbling one. Actually ingenious. Rather ironic that compared to this device, the way people use modern voice assistants is really not that much more elaborate.
This was so interesting, and incredible too. Thank you! I really hope there will be more videos on obscure technologies!
Hey felino, thanks! And yep, more on the way, a new video on the channel every week, spreading the obscure technology videos out a few weeks apart
Who else came from Vsauce?
i did
i did
i did
I did
Disgusting dude
I love lamp. The end of this video was illuminating.
please make a Zork "GET LAMP" reference to complete the trifecta
@@popularscience Sorry, the GET LAMP reference was...
Taken.
The advantage with this is it doesn't require an internet connect so a server on the other side of the World, tells my device too turn on.
I'm blown away! All the hassle was worth it, just to see that lamp turn *ON* in the end. Seeing that in 1987 would've been like stumbling upon one of *"Stranger Things'"* big reveals in your own hometown, in real life; the excitement, the wonder, the mystery, the IMPLICATIONS!! I'm inspired JUST by that lamp, alone.
It makes me wonder... What's our government hiding?
Amazing video, can't wait for more!
ty ty, new video on this channel every week from now on
We. want. more. paradoxes!
there must be paradoxical technology that exacerbates the problem it's meant to solve
well, mobile phones have done that to some degree, connecting us efficiently while sometimes encouraging isolation
That demon seed movie sure was crazy. 🤣
We probably shouldn't base too much future technology on movies like Demon Seed.
Never saw the movie but I read the book.
Best Hacker Movie: The Demon Seed: An “autonomous artificial intelligence program” that hacks its developer’s house then hacks his wife to bear a child.😅 a favorite x-tweet
@@panosdotnet a million hugs for you homie
I wish I could change my Alexa wake word to Proteus
Nice message. I also appreciate the microphone light operational on the Butler at the end of the video.
7:06 no, he has not spent 8 years. It is literally written in the description of the picture that you share, "For as little time as I've had with the Butler". What else did you make up?
Ah you bring me nostalgia
Isn't it funny how the devices that made big promises they couldn't really deliver on, cost a ton more money adjusted for inflation, and never quite worked right somehow generate nostalgia?? It's like we understood how hard they were trying to make us happy
At least they didn't pay to be spied on.
That's an interesting point -- this WAS too simple to be abused, which is kind of nice
Don’t kid yourself that corporations back then were more moral than they are now - tech at the time simply didn’t allow that kind of data collection.
This was a very nice introduction to many not familiar with the butler device. The presentation style and topic were both interesting. However, perhaps for story building or for theatrical reasons you appear to have dropped the ball on the technology as mentioned by some commenters and, more importantly, by the actual inventor chiming in. It was a technical topic, but you either need to "level up" your knowledge here or ask people with the necessary expertise to review your presentation before posting it. Also, read the whole manual, please. It reflects poorly on you and your channel if you do not. Nonetheless, I enjoyed your presentation very much and will subscribe to your channel. 😊👍
Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing back popular science or at least bringing it to my attention. I was a reader of the magazine when I was a kid. Looking forward to great videos to come.
This was my first video of this channel and i have to say, congrat's on making an amazing video.
It's vomprehensive, well structured and even managed to use the right music at the right moments, which is somehow still a rarity.
Well then, i'm gonna sub now and hope to see more video's about obscure old tech nobody remembers! :D
Here's to the crazy ones
What would we do without them?
16:14 This 23W isn't anything by pre-2000 standards. When "Energy Star" was pushed out in the late 90s, the Astroturf-roots community (of profit-minded corpos) decried it, for instructing every maker of electronics to use the commonly available options to save power in some standard ways. My c.1998 Cambridge Acoustics PC speakers originally had a weighty (transformer based) power block that used about 10W, by itself. Now I have a 36W switched power supply (large cap, for acoustics) plugged into it, that uses under 1W. I don't think switched power supplies were around before 1996, everything used a "wall wart" or had a heavy transformer built-in.
If you wanted to run this Antique Alexa, you could determine the power rail voltage(s) and replace whatever it had with a modern supply. This would eliminate 50-90% of the wasted electricity.
The primary change across everything, was switching from transformer-based power supplies, to "switching" power supplies around 1998. A friend has a Bose A/V 5.1 Surround system (basic bookshelf little speakers) from 2004, that consumes 25-35W continuously when off. I tried creating an external switching system to cut its supply since he only uses it a few hours a week, but it takes 2 minutes to do some internal indexing and loading whenever the power is lost. This BOSE system is the newest (last) consumer item I know of to have this sort of waste. By 2010, 65W-90W (laptop) power supplies were under $10. An easy point of reference to remember, is that each Watt of vampire power drain for something sitting idle, costs around $1 per year. So in 10 years since I swapped the power supply for my PC speakers, the $10 (or so) power supply has saved me around $100, which is twice what the speakers cost new (on sale).
By 2010, there was only one thing in the modern home still stealing from you. THE CABLE BOX. In an extension of their business model, the cable boxes used in the transition to digital cable were lightweight computers that stole electricity. Most were ON 24/7 and took 20-45W continuously to power, with DVRs being the higher wattage. Supposedly this is better now, as they always say "those are the old boxes we are phasing out" but then they went full digital and required a box at every TV in the home.. I don't know. A lot was said about LEDs saving power, but you don't leave lights on all the time.. Well, back in the 1980s and 1990s people did have more money, and rent was cheaper, and my porch light in 2000 did not even have a switch. It just stayed on, always. I eventually put a Philips florescent on it saving 80%, but mostly because the bulb died every month randomly. Society was really really slow in America, to legislate little tweaks that cut the waste of electricity.
These vampire losses are really expensive. If you have an older refrigerator, from 1980, it may use 1500 kWh per year (or more if its failing). A 2000 model used 800-1100. A new model uses 500-800. This means a dying old fridge may cost you 1000kWh per year, or $150. A window AC might waste $50-200 cooling, if its not running well, versus a high efficiency model. The savings on electricity will buy the new unit in a couple years.
I was a big fan of X10 devices back in the day. There was an interface for PCs that allowed me to program my Christmas displays. I remember that you needed a bridge to go between the two 110V halves of your breaker box. They are still around today!
You could automatically turn on and off lights a lot easier in the mid 80's, it was called "The Clapper".
This video is truly amazing. Sensitively curious about a very unexpected story of a person. Totally agree on the first move penalty. Something that really makes me wonder is: how they did that in hardware, since at least a part of it should be analog, no digital processor from 1983 was capable of comparing waveforms in realtime. Then the skyrocketed price over 20 yrs (?!). Why? And what about the original team considering no piece of info is online (I would expect to see a number of pieces of information proportional to the people involved). And by the way, it worked! Of course you cannot compare to SiriGPT, but the vision and idea was there already. Amazing!
(I like many such pieces of tech from early 80s, for example the first tv wristwatch 😅). Was good? Hell no, but cool indeed, have a look around
That was pretty great. Informative, well-written, funny, and well produced.
Thank you for sharing this device with us and for all the research you put into this video. I remember a nonvoice house control that used what looked like the same plug-in modules that this system used. The other system was from Radio Shack and was controlled by the TRS-80 and a home control cartridge that allowed the setup and automation of devices, like turning on the coffee pot at 6:00 am or running the lights to make it look like someone was home. Keep up the fine work.
Thank you so much for the great presentation. Truth be told, those of us born in the Dawn of information age read all of those manuals in order to have innovation. I feel those experiences were both instructive and liberating. We could feel proud to have conquered those nearly impossible user manuals and had bragging rights. Ever assemble a swing set? A waterbed? An entertainment system? Those instructions always introduced new "inventive" fasteners that failed and Glue was vastly improved to account for just the failures. One had to lay out all the bolts, screws, of various sizes...all structures, all according to the diagrams, on the carped and then read-read- and re-read the instructions before ever turning the first screw. Wow! I am an Engineer now, but I almost failed at my first major project back in 1996, of assembling my daughters massive Swing set. I had it almost assembled when I realized I mis-identified one of the major structures for a slightly shorter version and wound up having to tear it almost completely down in order to correct my mistake. Live and learn. "A picture is worth a Million words...unless you discover that its labels and instruction and are only in Japanese"(DDP).
It's not an AI machine, it's a voice recognition device. In the early 1980s, such tools had to be trained using sentences containing all syllables and sounds over time to recognize the speaker's intonation as well. Because of this, as you mentioned, there is no meaning to the speaker's language. Today, tools such as Siri, Google and Alexa are already more developed, so they can recognize speech even without training, but sometimes they have errors that happen mainly from background noise. After voice recognition, it is possible to run all sorts of applications, etc., including artificial intelligence engines.
Voice command software and the machines of that era all required a lengthy training period. As I recall, Alexa has a voice training mode as well. And even though Alexa or other voice command software now rely on servers over the Internet to complete a task, they still mess up. That thing did it all as a self-contained machine. I think you're allowing your current world view of how things should work cloud your expectations of how things in the past should work.
17:54 That is truly depressing haha, I already get annoyed when I have to restart or retrain an item in my Google Home.
For me the best content about a piece of tec I have seen so far! The end gave me goosebumps! Good job!
In the demo at the end I was impressed with how responsive the system was and how natural the voice actually sounded. I guess they used samples for it instead of a synthesized voice?
The design of the box is stunningly stylish, you have to give them that.
0:09 Siri came out in 2011, not 2004. The first iPhone didn’t even come out till 2009.
The first iPhone came out in 2007**
@@CaptainJree you’re right, my bad
Well done! Your points at the end about how many trailblazers do all the hard work and don't get the payoffs is really pretty sad. I think TiVo is another example of this. They made something so groundbreaking for the home consumer that it became a verb for recording a show at home. Then cable companies started offering DVR's and that really hurt TiVo. TiVo will always have a soft spot in my heart though. I was one of those folks who bought it when it first came out...$600 and it recorded a whopping 4 hours of content in high quality mode. Ahhh, how far we've come!
Wait wtf?!
How did I not know about this channel?!?
The amount of joy I felt when I saw it's vsauce2 Kevin!
In the early-mid 80's I worked on a Dragon voice recognition system for a paraplegic friend, and it was a complete 286 computer all by itself in a normal PC occupying a 16 bit slot, I don't remember if it spoke, but it had pages of 16 command words that it compared to voice samples to run computer programs, it didn't understand anything without many training sessions, and it was only for one user.
I'm so happy you are doing so much content again. Thank you
This is Amazing!! I've got to find one of these!! I've been trying to figure out how to voice-control my X-10 system for YEARS and haven't found out a way that wouldn't cost thousands of dollars. I have a GE Homeminder, which is fantastic, but being able to control my home with my voice is a Star Trek dream come true. I love everything about this - the vacuum florescent display, the voice, the programming (which honestly the instruction sread in the video didn't seem very confusing), and the design is gorgeous! Totally sleek - I love it. My home is filled with X-10 devices right now, and they work as well today as they did 40 years ago. And the best part is, I don't have to rely on some sort of bluetooth or internet connected device like Alexa or Google listening to my every word. The Butler In A Box is absolutely brilliant, and I hope I can find one soon! Thanks for the great video, and thank you Gus Searcy for such a forward-thinking invention!
You can probably voice control your X-10 system with a Raspberry Pi handling the voice processing (looks like the raspbian-ovos project would work?) and an X-10 Firecracker (CM17A RS-232 to X-10 RF) module. Might need a USB-to-RS232 module (or an Arduino with the CM17A library).