Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, as part of his 2016 resolution, has built an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, Jarvis, named after the virtual assistant in the Iron Man movies. It is voiced over by Morgan Freeman to distinguish Jarvis from existing AI assistants and to add the novelty effect of a celebrity. This anthropomorphizing effect is more likely to attach people to their AI devices and help them interact more with the product and provide training data to the devices, thus, enhancing the capabilities of the product.
Built in 100 hours, Zuckerberg started the process of building Jarvis, a personal assistant, by writing code to connect the existing systems in his home such as lights, thermostat, doors, music, TV, and nest cam. Zuckerberg engineered a few products such as a toaster to push down the bread when on, a food dispenser for the pet dog and a cannon to fire his Grey T-shirts.
This AI system which is written in Python, PHP and Objective C, works on voice commands via an iOS app and text commands via a chatbot hosted in Facebook Messenger. This works across iOS and Android and supports text, image and audio content. Zuckerberg personally prefers text messaging as it is more private, and less intrusive over voice based instructions and commands. He also mentions the limitations of speech recognition systems which are optimised for specific problems. But voice interaction at the same time is fast, the AI app can listen continuously with multiple devices around home and has a more psychological attribute than a machine has. Zuckerberg incorporated humour when he built voice in AI system to make the conversations more entertaining and help Jarvis become a part of the family.
Developed using machine learning, tracking, object recognition and face recognition techniques, Zuckerberg fused the Facebooks’ existing face recognition technology with extra cameras at the main door and other parts of the home to capture images from all angles and enhance the visual AI.
The initial keywords such as bedroom and lights were added with their synonyms, additional new words and new concepts. Open ended, context free requests such as “play me some music” and “turn the lights on” are being supplemented with positive and negative feedback to help the AI system learn the differences.
Most of these devices worked on different protocols and were not connected to the internet and posed a challenge in developing a uniform code. Zuckerberg feels that more internet connected devices and common APIs and standards will enable AI devices to talk to each other, and control everything in homes for more people.
The Facebook CEO looks forward to continue improving Jarvis by adding more functionality, more voice terminals around the house, and most importantly to teach the AI system to learn new skills itself rather than teaching it to perform specific tasks.
He also looks forward to use it as a foundation to build new products, especially as AI has become an integral part of Facebook, which they announced in their F8 2016 conference.
Zuckerberg says, it’s a long way to go to understand how learning works and what real intelligence is!
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