Just like he said he would, Mark Zuckerberg has built an AI assistant for his home, like the helpful/soothing/creepy Jarvis in “The Iron Man.”
And the Facebook CEO is pleased to report that he has “had fun adding classic lines like ‘I’m sorry, Priscilla. I’m afraid I can’t do that.'” (Priscilla Chan is his wife.)
Zuckerberg picks a personal challenge every year, and in 2016 he set two of them: to run 365 miles, and to build his very own Jarvis. In a Facebook post Monday, he shared what he has learned about artificial intelligence — which, as my colleague Ethan Baron wrote over the weekend, is Silicon Valley’s next revolution.
“I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year, and now I have a pretty good system that understands me and can do lots of things,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But even if I spent 1,000 more hours, I probably wouldn’t be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own — unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.”
Some of the things his Jarvis can do: control the lights, temperature, music, appliances and security in his house, plus wake up his daughter, Max, with Mandarin lessons or music. Lucky(?) kid.
But it turns out all the talk about internet of things doesn’t mean it’s easy to completely automate a home today, not even if you’re one of the geekiest and wealthiest people in the world.
“It’s hard to find a toaster that will let you push the bread down while it’s powered off so you can automatically start toasting when the power goes on,” he wrote. “I ended up finding an old toaster from the 1950s and rigging it up with a connected switch.” That’s something Google Home or Amazon’s Echo doesn’t do.
Other tidbits from what’s basically Zuckerberg’s science fair project report to the world:
- He talks to Jarvis, but he prefers to text back and forth with it, sometimes because it is “less disturbing” to other people. (He promised in another Facebook post to reveal who the voice of Jarvis is on Tuesday; Robert Downey Jr. had offered.)
- Zuckerberg used Facebook’s tools to build Jarvis, and he was impressed. He now knows what it feels like to be a new engineer at the company, he said. “I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you’re looking for.”
- He built the Jarvis app for iOS but is planning an Android version.
- “It would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world,” Zuckerberg said.
- And here’s some of the stuff Zuckerberg uses in his house: “We use a Crestron system with our lights, thermostat and doors, a Sonos system with Spotify for music, a Samsung TV, a Nest cam for Max.”
Photo: Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference in April 2016 in San Francisco. Zuckerberg has developed an AI assistant for his home over the past year. He shared details on Dec. 19, 2016. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)