Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss, has been showing off his personal robot butler, Jarvis. The helpful manservant – voiced by Morgan Freeman – can control lights, make toast and play music.
In a video, one of Zuckerberg’s favourite grey T-shirts is fired straight to him from his wardrobe when he asks for help getting dressed.
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Building Jarvis for Iron Man was a year long venture and he said in his Facebook post that;
“My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI — like Jarvis in Iron Man. Now that it’s working and the challenge is almost over, I wrote up a description of what I built, as well as some thoughts on the state of AI and what surprised me”.
Zuckerberg communicates with Jarvis using Facebook Messenger or through voice commands, using a special app he built and programmed onto multiple iPhones around his house.
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“In order to be useful I wanted to be able to communicate with (Jarvis) from anywhere I happened to be,” he said. “That meant the communication had to happen through my phone, not a device placed in my home.”
Zuckerberg says he will keep teaching Jarvis new tricks and connect the robot to more appliances. Over time he says it would be interesting to find ways of making robot butlers “available to the world”, although admits it would not be straightforward.
“I considered open sourcing my code, but it’s currently too tightly tied to my own home, appliances and network configuration.
“If I ever build a layer that abstracts more home automation functionality, I may release that. Or, of course, that could be a great foundation to build a new product.”
Zuckerberg will reveal his challenge for 2017 “in a few weeks” as the social media tycoon announces a new challenge for himself each January and building the Jarvis programme was his task for 2016, along with running 365 miles.
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