“Hello!” Hello. I thought this was gonna be awesome. But this proto-Siri-Alexa virtual
assistant nearly destroyed me. I was flipping through the March 1987 issue of
Popular Science and saw THIS image of a cartoon butler genie-bursting from a small black box, with
octopus arms juggling all sorts of different tech. It’s the Mastervoice “Butler in a Box,” and
it was billed as “The world’s first artificial intelligent environmental control system
for the home.” It can also call up to 16 different people, provide home security,
and do it all in 4 different languages. It’s supposed to make everything around your
home simpler, but it ends up generating more questions than answers. How does
it work without wifi, bluetooth, or the internet? If this was such a breakthrough
technology, why did it fade into total obscurity? Who invented this – and why is he a professional
magician who owned a 7-11 at the age of 21 and had a world champion Frisbee-catching dog
and also made a cannon to feed fish from a submarine – and why does his YouTube channel
have videos of his involvement in a MURDER TRIAL? You’ll get a glimpse of
its one-of-a-kind inventor, Gus Searcy – and you’ll also see if I can
get this thing to work. That was my first challenge… is it even possible to acquire
a Butler in a Box that functions today? Amazingly I found one on eBay that appeared
to be in mint condition – including the one critical part that’s missing almost all the time
and totally bricks the device. I cracked open the decades-old thick styrofoam shell and found a
nearly-indecipherable 134-page Owner’s Guide, the 3” x 9” x 11” Butler in a Box – which is
roughly the size of a PS4 – something called an “appliance module,” a lamp minder, a training
cassette and a standard RJ-45 phone jack and cord. I don’t have a landline… and I
don’t even have a cassette player. At least everyone had both of those in
the 1980s – but the dream of technology that magically responds to your voice
commands goes back centuries. Ali Baba triggered the door-opening mechanism
of the 40 Thieves’ den just by saying, “Open Sesame” – that folk tale is at
least 300 years, and probably a lot more. As the industrial world worked to
apply Newtonian physics to technology, the dreamers still dreamed. In 1911, Hugo
Gernsback detailed the “Luminor” system in his science fiction novel “Ralph 124C
41+” – Luminor used voice commands to turn on and adjust the intensity of lighting,
just like Alexa-controlled WiFi bulbs do now. By the 1960s, the Jetsons had a
robot maid that interacted with the whole family, Captain Kirk interfaced
seamlessly with the USS Enterprise, and a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic
computer terrorized Dr. David Bowman – HAL-9000. But even into the 80s, the prospect of a
voice-operated assistant still seemed like magic – and when magician Gus Searcy kept
dealing with people asking why he could pull a rabbit out of a hat but couldn’t
turn on the lights without getting up, he decided to invent a device that could. Or… that’s his official story, which also includes
citing the 1977 sci-fi horror film “Demon Seed,” in which a fully-automated home is
controlled by an artificial intelligence that forcefully impregnates its owner, as
a direct inspiration for Butler in a Box. If that seems unconventional… so is Gus. His
backstory is wild: he claims that at age 16, his parents signed over power of attorney to
him so that he could play the stock market, and he was earning six figures. At 19 he owned
a condo in California, and at 21 he became the youngest owner of a 7-11 franchise in the world.
Gus is still alive – he invented the ShowerMi$er, a water-saving solution for RVs, wrote a
motivational book, and worked for a legal services subscription company – that was where
he became deeply involved in a murder trial. So what’s real? What’s not? I don’t know? But the Butler in a Box does have a
listing on the Smithsonian website. So I got a tape player – and then I had to search
“cell phone landline adapter” to find this thing that acts as a bluetooth go-between for your
smartphone and an old-style home phone connection. It’s easy to connect stuff now
– but how did a voice-activated home automation system work a decade
before the world wide web went public, 14 years before WiFi, and 16 years
before Bluetooth was even available? Carrier current and the X10 protocol
for electronic communication. Basically, a microprocessor in the Butler
sends a series of pulses through the electrical wiring of the house, which are then read by
modules that lamps and appliances plug into, and those are each assigned a
specific house code and unit code. I’ve got a lamp here, and this is my goal for the
Butler – I want to be able to turn this lamp on and off just with my voice. So I plug the lamp
into a lamp module, plug that into the socket, manually turn the lamp on and leave it on, then
set the house code dial to something like A and the unit code dial to, say, 1. Then you log the
information that device 1 is a lamp assigned to A1 in the setup form in the back of the manual as a
reminder before you spend the required 25 minutes training the Butler to recognize your voice, with
the help of the included training cassette tape, which literally plays the Beverly Hills
Cop theme song “Axel F” in the background. Which I SERIOUSLY doubt Mastervoice licensed. And then you designate a specific
phrase like “LAMP” so the Butler knows you’re referring to Device
1 which is set to lamp module A1. That’s the easy part. I plugged in my Butler In A Box and turned
it on, which was a huge win – there was no guarantee that an obscure 40 year old piece of
tech was going to power up. There’s a 16-digit alphanumeric vacuum fluorescent display, and that
works great. So then I just had to program it. And to do that, you need that critical bit
of information that for almost all of the surviving Butlers in a Box has been lost:
the four digit alphanumeric pin. It’s meant to be a security measure – it’s located on the
inside cover of the owner’s guide and you cannot change it. If you lose it? No pin, no butler
– the box is locked forever. CelGenStudios on Youtube has been trying to reverse engineer
the pin to his Butler In A Box for 8 years. But I’ve got my pin: #S93K. So how
do I input it? If you guessed “talk to it,” because this is a cutting edge
voice-activated device, you guessed wrong. It turns out there’s a hidden pressure-sensitive
keyboard flap that folds out of the front bottom of the Butler. But it’s actually laid out
like an old alpha-numeric keypad, not a QWERTY keyboard – and here are the verbatim instructions
on how to input that pin to unlock the device: “To enter information requiring letters
of the alphabet, you would use the Alpha Select mode of operation… The last three
keys, top row at right, are Alpha 1, Alpha 2, and Alpha 3 (see figure 6-2). These
three keys have two functions each. First, in the Alpha Select mode of operation, these
keys will permit you to choose which letter on the number keys 1 through 0 will be entered
into your unit. The three small squares above the thick line correspond to the sequence of alphabet
letters above the thick line on the number keys. Example: Alpha Select Key 1, with the solid
square in the first of three possible positions, allows you to select the letter A, the
first letter selection on Key 2. Alpha Select Key 3, with the solid square in
the third of three possible positions, allows you to select the letter C, the
third letter selection on Key 2, and so on.” AND SO ON, INDEED. I’m pretty used to translating poorly-written
instructions with cheap Amazon electronics, but how was anyone but the most hardcore
tech enthusiast expected to navigate 134 pages of this decades before average people
were even used to using home computers? “And that in the future, most people will have
a computer system right next to their TV.” It’s kafkaesque, and the whole thing seriously
tested my patience before I even discovered what was broken on this thing – but before we
do that – you need to know what this cost. Gus Searcy started talking in
public about the Butler in 1983, and he said the ‘commercial applications of the
Butler would be staggering’ – he also recognized that a voice-activated home control device
could be seriously useful for the elderly or someone with a disability. He was right about
that part, but he was wrong about the price tag. In 1983, his target price was about $300 –
half of the initial price of the Commodore 64 and twice the price of the first
NES a couple years later. In 1984, he said $500 – this 1985 ad listed it for
$1,195. By the time Jim Schefter tested the Butler in 1987 and wrote about it
in Popular Science, it was $1,495. We’re not done. A 1990 episode of The Home Show announced it
was $3,000, which became $4,000 by the year 2000 – adjusted for inflation, it started out as
a $940.94 device that became a $7,268.86 device… and that’s including only two modules,
one for a lamp and one for an appliance. Every single device in your home required its
own module, so if you maxed out your whole house with 62 more modules at $36 each
– for your coffee makers, TVs, radios, VCRs, alarms, electronic curtains, garage door,
sprinklers, thermostat, fish tanks and pool pumps, whatever – you’re nearing $10,000 in today’s
dollars… and you also needed microphones and speakers in every single room, and an electrician
to install those and whatever in-wall modules. For this Butler to work on more than just a lamp
and a TV in your living room, it was… $15,000? And one of the most amazing things to me as I
was researching Butler In A Box is that for more than 20 years it was announced over and over
again as a magical, futuristic, life-changing technology culminating with a feature
on Extreme Home Makeovers in 2005. Alexander? Did you call? laughter HOW? How did it stay futuristic
for two decades while pretty much every other piece of tech got a
lot better and a lot cheaper!? Well, speech and voice recognition was
actually a really hard nut to crack – in 1952 Bell Laboratories’ “AUDREY” was able to recognize
each of the digits 0 through 9, but with only 90% accuracy – and the only guy who could use it was
its inventor. By the 1970s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA – was funding
research to improve on the limitations of the two basic recognition models at the time: trying to
match spoken words to pre-recorded waveforms, or using a series of algorithms to create a ‘score’
that matched with a pretty good guess at the word. When Gus Searcy was touting his miracle Butler,
the rest of the industry was working with Hidden Markov Models, like the earliest Dragon
Dictate software – it was another 20 years before DARPA’s research broke enough ground
for Siri to translate your voice into a code, which was then matched with patterns and
keywords, all in different tones and accents, so that it can determine and carry out a
specific action, and continually collect and process information to get
better at all of it over time. Okay. Wait. So if devices at the time struggled
to process ONE language, how was the Butler in a Box able to understand four separate languages?
Well, it didn’t. I mean, it did, but it didn’t. The Butler could handle voice commands from
four separate users, but every user had to program it individually. So if I’ve programmed
it for me, my wife can’t say, “Turn Lamp On” and have it work unless she has programmed it for her
voice, too, with exactly the same phrases that I used. Except for naming the Butler. She would
have to name it something else. So if I named “Jeeves” she would have to name it “Godfrey”
or something else, “Beyonce” it didn’t matter. Because the Butler in the Box isn’t
Siri or Alexa. It doesn’t know anything, and it can’t really learn, either. But it can respond to four distinctly-programmed
sets of sounds. That can be Japanese, or Klingon, or The Black Speech of Mordor. You
could even make up your own language just to use with the Butler. It can’t
tell the difference, since it doesn’t know anything – that technically means it can
know everything. Or at least 4 of everything. Alright, let me tell you what’s broken. So I plugged it in and got this awful crackling
sound – that was supposed to be the Butler saying “Hello.” So alright, the speaker is broken – I
could bypass that by plugging in an external set of old computer speakers. And I got… THE SAME
BROKEN CRACKLE SOUND. Whatever. I moved on with the setup, did the microphone test, and got NO
response at all and realized that Jeeves here may be dead. I took it down to my Dad’s shop, he knows
audio electronics and circuitry, so I thought maybe he could take it apart and solder some loose
connections or something. This was the something. He turned it over and showed me
the volume slider for the speaker, which was turned all the way to 0. So we raised
the volume, plugged it in, and heard “HELLO.” They call that “USER ERROR.” I’m user. There was a microphone sensitivity slider
set to 0, too – so I assumed that would fix my mic problem. The Butler has a
visual indicator that shows asterisks to display how well your mic is working. And
my mic wasn’t working. I got zero asterisks. The internal microphone WAS broken.
I ordered a karaoke mic with a jack adapter and that kinda worked – then stopped
working. At that point we brought in the big guns. My dad called his electronics wizard
friend, Neal, who took it apart, cleaned up the mic jack and sliding potentiometers,
fixed a cracked board and saved the day. SIDENOTE: While Neal had it in his shop,
he tested its power usage and was blown away. It turns out this draws a
constant 23 watts in standby. To put that in perspective it’s up to 11 ½
times an Alexa or the equivalent of 110 hours of Playstation gaming per month. Just
sitting there. Racking up your electric bill. Now. I read in a few places that setting up
the voice control was going to take SEVERAL hours… but I actually trained my Butler
to do the basics in 25 minutes. I taught it to recognize my voice by speaking a series
of 10 specific words, like Air Conditioner, Mood Lighting, and Airplane. You
can then program up to 10 commands, 18 commands to call 16 different people, set
4 alarm words, and train 32 device words. But I just did LAMP. And like I said you can the Butler anything
you want – that name is the “Entry Word” to wake up the Butler. So, to get it
to work, it’s your Butler’s name, then tying a specific device to the command
you’re about to give – like, Jeeves, Lamp, On. Then you just have to test whether it or
not all that actually works. If it does, you press YES. If your voice commands don’t work,
you press NO, and then re-train it until they do. And multiply most of that whole process
by THIRTY-TWO to max out the Butler’s devices. And make that 128 times
to set up all 4 different users. And then it can all just… disappear. Because I haven’t told you the worst
part, the Butler In A Box kryptonite… What happens if the power goes
out is the most depressing, defeating aspect of this entire device – really
worse than the PIN. If there’s a power outage, the backup batteries will preserve the
Butler’s memory – all the device programming, all the voice programming – for 3 hours.
After that? It’s gone. It’s all gone. It was possible to change the battery clip
cable to accept a 9-volt battery that lasted for 10 hours, and it was possible to back up the
programming memory – NONE of the voice training – to a home computer using an RS-232 port, which
was even more complicated than any of the setup. The reality is if a storm knocked out power for
more than a few hours, your Butler – Alfred, Jeeves, Godfrey, Lurch, Geoffrey, whatever
you decided to name him – was dead. In that 1987 article, Jim Schefter concluded that
“the Butler in a Box is for the gadget freak, the computer buff, and the handicapped,”
noting that Gus Searcy himself compares the device to “a slightly-deaf 80
year old man.” Jim suggested that it wasn’t uncommon to have to
repeat yourself 2 or 3 times. So… did the Butler in a Box
work? Yeah. yeah it really did. “You again? I’m home. Alright wait a minute.” Y’know we’re used to driving
in comfort on the highway, and the Butler in a Box is a horse
and buggy – but it’ll get you there. Early technology is just usually really messy
– sometimes it’s not good to be first. In 1937, Jan Romein called the phenomenon “Wet van
de remmende voorsprong” – economists call it the “First Mover Disadvantage.” – because
a promising product or idea tends to become a canary in the coalmine for competitors,
who then solve those problems and achieve success. They’re free riders as you take
all the damage from blazing the trail. It’s why you might have an Amazon Alexa in your
room, or Apple’s Siri in your pocket – and why you definitely don’t have a Mastervoice
Butler in a Box in your living room. You’ve never even heard of this. Not
only does it not have a wikipedia page, it’s not a footnote on the pages for
Home Automation or Virtual Assistant. This isn’t a tech video. It’s a ghost story. There’s a reason why so many of the
people who tend to do things first are eccentric – they’re the ones
who are willing to take the risks, or sometimes they just don’t care about the
consequences. The more rational people wait to improve on a product or to address
the concerns of its early adopters. But we needed gas street lamps to get to cheaper,
safer, better electric street lamps. We needed an RS-232 port to get to USB-C. And we needed
Butler in a Box to get to the intuitive voice assistants that, honestly, don’t even impress
us anymore – we’ve just come to expect them. Because we need the eccentrics, and we need their
technology, even if it turns out to be flawed. Mr. Belvedere? May I help you?
Lamp. Okay. On. As you wish! See you in the future.
