In a blog post on Facebook last January, Zuckerberg announced that his personal challenge for 2016 was to build a “simple AI” to run his home. Oh yeah, same.
Well he just posted an update on his progress and so far his system, Jarvis, handles the lights, temperature, appliances, music, security — even babysitting (he references Jarvis playing his 1-year-old Max a Mandarin or music lesson when she wakes up… ya know, just baby stuff)
Because CEOs have hobbies, too. Zuck says building the AI was actually less time consuming than his other 2016 goal of running 365 miles in a year #humblebrag.
Jarvis’ natural language processing, facial recognition, and speech recognition allow it to do things like unlock a gate for party guests and make toast that comes out just right every time.
And, while his goal was to learn about the state of artificial intelligence, naturally he learned “more than [he] expected” about the challenges of language processing.
For example, identifying synonyms or picking up on context clues to differentiate between phrases like “my office” when coming from different speakers. As a result, Zuck thinks texting is the future…
The system is built to recognize text requests through Facebook’s Messenger app, which gives him the option to give discrete commands, when not at home, or when asking Google about your rash is a little too embarrassing.
In fact, Zuck says he ended up texting commands much more than speaking, a trend he thinks will emerge in AI going forward. Bow down for Big Z has spoken.
Although he didn’t share the actual code (it’s connected to his home security), Zuckerberg hinted at the idea of using it as the “foundation to build a new product.”