Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had first talked publicly about building a personal AI to run his home in June this year during his first Facebook Live Q&A session. In that Facebook Live, Zuckerberg had invited comedian Jerry Seinfeld and revealed his two personal challenges for 2016-- running 365 miles in 2016 and building a simple AI to run his home.
While many thought it was just a small talk he was holding with the comedian, Zuckerberg has actually done it.
With just 10 days left for 2016 to end, Zuckerberg announced Monday that he has finished coding his personal assistant that "control his home, including lights, temperature, appliances, music and security, that learns my tastes and patterns, that can learn new words and concepts, and that can even entertain Max (his daughter)."
Watch Video: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Jarvis AI in action:
"In some ways, this challenge was easier than I expected. In fact, my running challenge (I also set out to run 365 miles in 2016) took more total time," said the Facebook CEO in a post.
Recalling the Facebook Live conversation between Seinfeld and Zuckerberg, the comedian had a simple question for Zuckerberg, "Isn't it funny how hard we work to just eliminate a little bit of effort. I mean to get the door is not much work.
e are going to put in a tremendous amount of work to just save us walking to the door and opening it?"
Watch video: The first Facebook Live Q&A session by Mark Zuckerberg
It seems like Zuckerberg finally has the answer to this.
"My goal was to learn about the state of artificial intelligence -- where we're further along than people realize and where we're still a long ways off. These challenges always lead me to learn more than I expected, and this one also gave me a better sense of all the internal technology Facebook engineers get to use, as well as a thorough overview of home automation," said Zuckerberg.
So, what can Zuckerberg's AI like 'Jarvis in Iron Man' can do?
Zuck's Jarvis can process language, recognise speech as well as face. It can switch on or off the lights of his bedroom, lower the AC temperature or lower it or play a particular song in any room of his house (it can even play tracks as per mood or recommend songs).
The Jarvis AI is also enabled with vision and face recognition, like it can tell whether his daughter "Max is awake and moving around her crib". It can identify objects like "whether it is Beast (his pet Puli dog) or a rug in the room."
Watch video: The Beast
Zuckerberg has installed a few cameras at his door to identify people. The AI then decides whether to open the door or not to let the person in.
To get the most of Jarvis, Zuckerberg has created a Facebook Messenger Bot to communicate with Jarvis. This will enable him to be continuously in touch with his AI over the phone.
And not just that. He has also dedicated an app for enabling his Jarvis with voice and speech recognition. This is because Zuckerberg doesn't want to always "take out his phone, open an app, and start typing." He just simply wants to speak to Jarvis, like what Amazon Echo users do.
Finally, why code so hard to just open the door? (Asked by Jerry Seinfeld earlier)
"As the CEO of Facebook, I don't get much time to write code in our internal environment. I've never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive," he said.
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