Mark Zuckerberg loves being able to sit down and build something from scratch — something he may not have the chance to do now as often as he would like because of his position as CEO of Facebook.
But Zuckerberg comes up with personal growth goals for himself each year to keep his brain active. In 2010, the goal was to learn Mandarin.
This year, the Facebook founder made it his goal to "build a simple A.I. to run my home — like Jarvis in Iron Man."
Zuckerberg has spent about 150 hours for the project, which makes use of a Messenger bot, an iOS voice app, and a door camera as its front-end interface. The A.I. can turn the lights on and off, adjust the temperature of the thermostat, play music from Spotify, open the gates for guests, and toast bread inside Zuckerberg's Silicon Valley home.
Jarvis also understands natural language processing, speech recognition, and face recognition. The A.I. has been created using the programming languages Python, PHP, and Objective C.
A Visit To Zuckerberg's Home
Daniel Terdiman, a technology journalist for Fast Company, was able to visit Zuckerberg's house for an exclusive to see for himself how the A.I. works. During his visit, Zuckerberg instructed the A.I. to turn the lights off and on simply by typing a message from his iPhone, and it performed the instructions without a hitch.
But when Zuckerberg commanded the A.I. to do the same thing using a voice command — with the help of an iOS app — it was not able to do so right away. The CEO had to repeat the instruction four times before the A.I. understood the command.
Instructing the A.I. to play some music got quicker results during Terdiman's visit.
"Play us some music," said Zuckerberg, and the system played a David Guetta song. "Turn the volume up." And the music became louder.
Jarvis Learns to Play Music
For Zuckerberg, Jarvis' most outstanding accomplishment is its capacity to learn a person's musical taste. "I mostly just ask Jarvis to 'play me some music' and by looking at my past listening patterns, it mostly nails something I'd want to hear. If it gets the mood wrong, I can just tell it, for example, 'that's not light, play something light,' and it can both learn the classification for that song and adjust immediately."
The A.I. has also learned to distinguish both Zuckerberg and his wife's tastes in music. "It also knows whether I'm talking to it or Priscilla is, so it can make recommendations based on what we each listen to."
Why Zuckerberg Still Loves To Code
In order for Jarvis to be successful, it needed to understand a certain level of contextual nuance.
"The more context the system has, the smarter it gets overall," wrote Zuckerberg in his Facebook note.
Zuckerberg's work on Jarvis has given the CEO a renewed exposure to engineering, which was something he missed.
"I spent so much time coding with Facebook's tools, and I don't normally get to do that as CEO of the company," he said.
