Zuckerberg Shows Off His Personal AI — Complete With Morgan Freeman’s Voice

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week gave the world a glimpse of the progress he has made over the past year on his homemade artificial intelligence assistant Jarvis.

Zuckerberg announced in January he planned to build a personal assistant similar to Iron Man’s Jarvis as part of his annual New Year’s challenge.

In a humorous video released Tuesday, Zuckerberg revealed what a year’s worth of coding has developed: an AI with the voice of actor Morgan Freeman that helps him streamline his daily tasks at the office and at home. He can talk to the AI on his phone and computer and it can control the lights, temperature, appliances, music and security of his home. Zuckerberg has even programmed it to entertain his infant daughter, Max.

Check out the video — which Zuck describes as a “fun summary and not a live demo” — below:

Zuckerberg, in a blog post, said the AI challenge was easier than expected in that it took last time to achieve than his other New year’s resolution, which was to run one mile each day.

The challenging part, he said, was connecting and communicating with all of the different technology in his home.

“Before I could build any AI, I first needed to write code to connect these systems, which all speak different languages and protocols. We use a Crestron system with our lights, thermostat and doors, a Sonos system with Spotify for music, a Samsung TV, a Nest cam for Max, and of course my work is connected to Facebook’s systems. I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“Further, most appliances aren’t even connected to the internet yet. It’s possible to control some of these using Internet-connected power switches that let you turn the power on and off remotely. But often that isn’t enough. For example, one thing I learned is it’s hard to find a toaster that will let you push the bread down while it’s powered off so you can automatically start toasting when the power goes on. I ended up finding an old toaster from the 1950s and rigging it up with a connected switch. Similarly, I found that connecting a food dispenser for Beast or a grey T-shirt cannon would require hardware modifications to work.”

Zuckerberg’s wife, Dr. Priscilla Chen, also made an amusing video about living with an AI, which originally had Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice.

Zuckerberg said he plans to continue to tinker with Jarvis with some immediate goals being the creation of an Android app, setting up Jarvis voice terminals in more areas of his home and connecting more appliances.

In the long-term, Zuck may look at ways to make versions of his Jarvis AI available to the world.

Jennifer Cowan is the Managing Editor for SiteProNews.

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