Zuckerberg Codes Real-Life ‘Jarvis’, Showing Ways AI Can Improve

The voice-assistant-enabled feature lets Mark do some very cool things inside his house.

The machines are coming to take over our lives, and no one can stop that from happening. But most of that is happening because we’re building them.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, claims to have coded himself to glory this week, giving himself a virtual assistant called Jarvis, the name borrowed from the Iron Man movie. He challenged himself to build an AI of the namesake, and here’s what he had to say about this achievement:

The Challenges:

• Connecting and communicating with all of the different systems is a complex process right now
  
• Most appliances still not connect to the internet
• AI doesn’t understand the context of commands given. Eg: turning on the lights in the right room
• AI is not good enough to understand speech yet
  
• AI devices need a singular standard to work in tandem

Getting multiple devices to work simultaneously was a big hindrance for Mark, and he pointed out that that was something that needed improvement by highlighting the difference in connectivity standards used by companies right now.

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.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg built a Jarvis Messenger bot on his phone, which can be used to communicate when he’s not in the house. He could either use text or speech to command Jarvis, but he mostly preferred using text to do the work.

However, he does think that AI has a long way to go before it can be our smart companion. Jarvis had a hard time understanding which room’s lights needed to be turned on, or where music needs to be played.

Understanding context is important for any AI. For example, when I tell it to turn the AC up in “my office”, that means something completely different from when Priscilla tells it the exact same thing. That one caused some issues! Or, for example, when you ask it to make the lights dimmer or to play a song without specifying a room, it needs to know where you are or it might end up blasting music in Max’s room when we really need her to take a nap. Whoops.

Mark Zuckerberg

There’s no doubt that Mark has done a commendable job with Jarvis, especially having achieved it by himself. After all, one needs to realise the amount of work that goes into fine-tuning all the gizmos at his house, and programming them to work in unison.

But it would be fair to say that such a tedious task would have been wrapped up in no time by a team of engineers.

Now, we wait to hear about Mark’s self-assigned challenge for 2017.