Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has built himself an AI butler, just like the one you saw in the Iron Man movies. He’s also named it Jarvis, just like Tony Stark. That being said it would seem that this is more of a proof of concept rather than Facebook’s next big venture; although there is a demo video showing what it should be able to do once he’s done.
Jarvis is supposedly capable doing the same things as the Amazon Echo or Google Home, with a few extra features. Zuckerberg’s virtual butler is capable of recognising people at the front door and letting them in. It is also supposedly capable of shooting tshirts, making toast, and sounding like Morgan Freeman.
The announcement of Jarvis’ existence came from Zuckerberg himself, although it was more about his experience in trying to work with artificial intelligence. It’s a substantially long post, and Zuckerberg is not exactly a skilled writer. However, he manages to start a conversation about the challenges of attempting to create a smart house.
One of the more interesting points was how he opted to use a Facebook Messenger bot to help with his mobile interface. The idea is that it makes much more sense to communicate through text instead of audio, as this provides the user with the option of checking notifications and messages in his own time. It also creates less of a distraction while interacting with the AI while outside of the house.
Zuckerberg suggests that future AI assistants should provide a text based interface to cover this aspect, and it isn’t entirely a bad idea. Especially considering how used people are with the idea of texting.
As far as Jarvis goes, there will not be any product launch. This AI exists as an experiment by Zuckerberg, although he has said that he will working on it from time to time to expand its abilities. What is really impressive is that it only took the Facebook creator a single year to put all this together.
[Source: Facebook]
