Mark Zuckerberg builds software butler for his home
Paris : Mark Zuckerberg’s artificial intelligence-imbued software “butler” -- named Jarvis -- is now in service, and even plays with his family, the Facebook chief said yesterday.
Zuckerberg took on the personal project this year, devoting about 100 hours to making a system inspired by the “Iron Man” film character Jarvis as a virtual assistant to help manage his household.
“In some ways, this challenge was easier than I expected,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his page at the leading social network.
“In fact, my running challenge (I also set out to run 365 miles in 2016) took more total time.”
Zuckerberg said that he can talk to his AI creation through his phone or computer, and it can control lights, temperature, music, security, appliances and more.
The software learns his tastes and patterns, as well as new words or concepts, and can even entertain his daughter Max, according to Zuckerberg.
Knowing faces
Natural language processing and facial recognition capabilities were built into Jarvis, enabling it to understand spoken or texted commands and recognize who is issuing them, Zuckerberg noted.
The software can determine when a guest at the door is expected and let them into the home, while notifying the family that someone has arrived, according to the post.
“One aspect that was much more complicated than I expected was simply connecting and communicating with all of the different systems in my home,” Zuckerberg said.
“Most appliances aren’t even connected to the internet yet.”
Assistants such as Jarvis would not only need devices in homes to be linked to the internet, they would have to run on common standards, according to the Facebook co-founder and chief executive, who returned to his software-writing roots for the project.
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