In an achievement that will make you ask existential questions about life and personal butlers, Mark Zuckerberg made public today the results of his New Year’s resolution to automate his home.
The Facebook CEO had set out earlier this year to build his own version of Jarvis, the artificially intelligent computer system from “Iron Man.”
“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 in a Facebook post.
Zuckerberg’s invention responds to both his voice and that of wife Priscilla Chan; it can even interact with their daughter Max. It can control lights, temperature, music, and security, among others.
This homemade piece of artificial intelligence (AI) “learns my tastes and patterns,” Zuckerberg reported.
However, he conceded: “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.”
Programming language barriers have proven to be the biggest impediments to communication between his intelligent personal assistant and various brands of smart home products.
“For assistants like Jarvis to be able to control everything in homes for more people, we need more devices to be connected and the industry needs to develop common APIs and standards for the devices to talk to each other,” he wrote.
It’s still unclear whether Zuckerberg’s DIY creation will be released commercially to compete with trendy smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home. But this is 2016. Anything could happen, and a Facebook smart home assistant may not be that far-fetched an idea.
This story was originally published on www.property-report.com on 20 December 2016.
