Mark Zuckerberg told about his AI-assistant Jarvis

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg told about the results of his personal project, which he had planned for himself for 2016. The goal of the founder of Facebook was to create a functional AI assistant with voice control, by analogy with a system of comics and Marvel films about Iron Man.

Zuckerberg's development bears the same name as the comic book system Jarvis. At the same time, Mark notes that the creation of such a system was even easier than he had expected.

Voice control features already exist in various gadgets, and some companies offer solutions in the form of intelligent voice assistants. At the same time, almost all of these systems are poorly trained and designed for the mass consumer.
')
Zuckerberg went further. The basis was taken from the voice assistant from Amazon - Alexa. At the same time, the founder of the social network personally “brought” the stock software to the required level. As a result, various smart home systems were connected to Jarvis, which equipped the Zuckerberg dwelling and implemented a number of other possibilities. Great importance was given to the processing of commands in a natural language, that is, the system had to perceive the treatment of Mark and his wife Chan as if they were simply turning to a living person.

In this, the founder of Facebook was able to achieve significant success. Using neural networks and machine learning, Zuckerberg was able to train his Jarvis to distinguish between the host’s musical tastes. That is, if he tells the assistant to turn on the music and put on “something light”, then the system will select exactly those songs that the founder of Facebook will like.

Another important achievement of Mark as a programmer and developer is what he taught the system to distinguish between his own requests and those of his wife. As an example, the situation is given when Chan asks something to do "in my office." In this case, Jarvis, for example, turns on the light in Chan's office, not Mark, and vice versa.

During development, the code was written in Python, Objective C and PHP. In just 100 working hours (about 12.5 working 8-hour days), Zuckerberg was able to connect the following systems to Jarvis (and many did not have the ability to communicate with other gadgets and devices out of the box):



Control is via smartphone using Alexa’s voice interface. It also implemented the possibility of textual control in natural language in a regular chat with Jarvis. According to Mark, it is very convenient at night when other family members are sleeping. At the same time, he notes that using the text interface is surprisingly much:

“When I have a choice: to speak or write, I use the text more often than I might have expected. There are a number of reasons for this, but basically the use of the text is less of a concern for the people around you. If you do something that concerns everyone in the room, for example, turn on the music, then the speaker will feel comfortable, but most of the time text input feels like more acceptable. Similarly, when Jarvis communicates with me, I prefer to receive text messages from him rather than voice messages. If the voice can distract, then using the text gives you more control: you choose when to read it. Even when I use voice commands through a smartphone, I prefer Jarvis to answer me with text messages. ”

An interesting fact is that Mark mentions an emotional reaction to Jarvis. As acknowledged by the head of Facebook, after he began using his voice system, he wants to make an assistant more humane. First of all, add more humor to Jarvis answers. Zuckerberg explains his emotional reaction to the helper in this way: he communicates with him (both by voice and text messages), which prevents him from being perceived as just a computer or software. At the same time, Mark notes that he often communicates with Jarvis when he is not even at home; connected to the systems of a smart home, cameras and intercom at the gate, the AI ​​assistant can give the head of Facebook a full account of what is happening in his home.

While Jarvis works through the firmware of the smartphone. In the future, the head of Facebook plans to write an Android application and continue to improve Jarvis on a scale of his own home. At the same time, Zuckerberg mentioned in his blog post that he would like to make Jarvis ever accessible to the whole world.