Mark Zuckerberg’s AI butler also recommends music

He is able to talk to Jarvis on his phone and computer to control the lights, temperature, appliances, music and security with facial recognition, in his home. The system that runs through Zuckerberg’s home has a synthesized voice, but Zuckerberg recently asked the public to weigh in who should provide Jarvis with a proper voice. “Through a system of positive and negative feedback, an AI can learn these differences”.

He explained in his post that one of the most complicated parts of building the AI was getting different systems in his home to communicate and connect with one another. “But often that isn’t enough”. “Similarly, I found that connecting a food dispenser for Beast or a gray t-shirt cannon would require hardware modifications to work”, writes Zuckerberg.

“Although this challenge is ending, I’m sure I’ll continue improving Jarvis since I use it every day and I’m always finding new things I want to add”, Zuckerberg said. To some extent, this became possible because of Facebook’s work on voice recognition and image processing.

To build his Jarvis AI from scratch, he used Python, PHP, and Objective-C programming language. So, there is a Messenger Bot which allows Zuckerberg to communicate and command Jarvis from anywhere, via text. He mentions in his post that he can also send audio clips to the AI’s server where they’re translated into text and then executed.

Jarvis will control Zuckerberg’s home.

When Zuckerberg first introduced Jarvis, he put the question of its voice in the hands of the Facebook community.

“Ever since I built voice into Jarvis, I’ve also wanted to build in more humour”. If you think ol’ Zuck has watched Iron Man one to many times you’d be right because that’s what inspired the idea, and the name.

Zuckerberg announced results of the project, a challenge he set for himself this year, as digital home assistants by Google and Amazon.com competed for holiday sales and were expected to outsell popular emerging gadgets such as virtual reality headsets and drones.

Over time he says it would be interesting to find ways of making robot butlers “available to the world”, although admits it would not be straightforward.

Zuckerberg says he considered open-sourcing his code, but the system is too closely tied to his home and network configuration at the moment.