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Mark Zuckerberg Demos Jarvis, His Own Home AI Assistant (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: As Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2016, he built Jarvis -- a service similar to Alexa or Google Assistant, but built to do exactly the things he wants to do in his home, and controllable by both voice and Messenger bot. Now that it's mostly complete, he demoed it for Fast Company's Daniel Terdiman. Terdiman writes: "In his January post announcing the Jarvis project, Zuckerberg wrote that he'd set out to build a system allowing him to control everything in the house, including music, lights, and temperature, with his voice. He also wanted Jarvis to let his friends in the house just by looking at their faces when they arrive and to alert him to anything important going on in Max's room. And he hoped to design the system to 'visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations [at Facebook] more efficiently.' Now, in December, he has achieved all of that, save for the bit about VR. And it works. However, when he showed off the system to me in person, I learned that it sometimes needs a little coddling. Zuckerberg began by demoing the Messenger bot he'd built as a front end for the system. Using his iPhone, he typed simple commands to turn the lights off and on, and sure enough, they went off and then on. On the other hand, he also built the system to respond to voice commands, via a custom iOS app he'd created, and there, the results were decidedly more inconsistent. He had to tell the system four times to turn the lights off before it got dark."
Other than the facial recognition and text interface, the Amazon Echo pretty much does a great job of integrating all your smart home devices.
Works every time. So does my light switch thinking about it
I know Mark wants to be Tony Stark... but he is more akin to Gus Gorman
Wow, the guy is a genius. He can TALK to an app and had it turn the lights off? And it only took four tries? Unbelievable. I'll bet Linus couldn't do that!
I doubt he did everything from scratch.
Lucida from the University of Michigan looks to be a good self hosted solution to a backend and Jasper a good voice front end.
Home Assistant integrates well with both Google Home and Amazon Echo.
He had to tell the system four times to turn the lights off before it got dark."
Then again, it sounds like he might have. Echo+HASS is much more consistent than that.
"Engineering, make this for me" == "I made this"
Come on people (like MZ), admit it - you just want to be a brain in vat, and do everything by thought. Turn your fucking lights off with a switch, like everyone else. Go to the door and greet your fucking friends, if they're your friends, and you actually have any. Really, this is just ridiculous. It is hard to imagine anything more unimportant.
Where's the suit of powered armor, Zuckerberg?
Did this guy actually do this entirely on his own?
Yes he did. I live next door to Zuck, and I watched him dig silicate rocks out of his backyard, crush them into sand, smelt his own silicon, and apply the dopants to make transistors. Anything less would have been cheating.
Maybe it's his spouse?
but having the arrogant so and so name it after a butler bother's me. Maybe if he coulda got the 'Jeevs' name (it sounds sillier than Jarvis).
Oh, and besides the voice activation we had this kind of crap on my C64. I remember seeing advertised in computer catelogs back in the day and thought it was awesome. I sorta out grew it though. I mean, I can turn my own lights off. Maybe when I'm 80 I can't, in which case I could see this being useful.
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Nope, Jarvis is the Avengers' butler in the comics.
And it's news because he's got a high profile full time job.
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff which, ... umm, ok move on folks
It's clear Jarvis as an A.I. assistant predates Zuckenberg's use of it and that he is poaching on the value of the name.
I'm sure Marvel's lawyers will contact him for an appropriate licensing fee. But they might wait to see if it succeeds under that name and then go for bigger bucks.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
He stole facebook. He can't actually do anything himself except wear a hoodie and grin like an idiot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Perhaps an unimaginative choice... but wait, Disney now owns the MCU and I'm pretty sure they retrospectively bought the distribution rights to the films made before they bought Marvel, such as Iron Man.
I suppose Zuckerberg will be fine as long as he doesn't plan to make any commercial gain from "Jarvis" but if he tries it could be slightly entertaining to watch Disney lawyers circling him.
Want to bet that this "personal assistant" doesn't have to upload every and any kind of information you share with it, willingly or otherwise, to Facebook?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If so, the money has really gone to his head.
If this were some random guy's Hackaday project; I'd be inclined to give it a friendly look, so long as he was willing to be good natured about admitting the rough edges; but we aren't exactly talking genius-level work; much less 'so genius it only happens in fictional settings where the title 'Dr.' implies cutting edge knowledge of at least a half-dozen disciplines...' level work.
If Zuck wants to be Tony Stark; I wouldn't necessarily mind him heading off to prove it by being seriously wounded and trapped in some hellhole with only a box of scrap; and escaping by quickly whipping together a suit of power armor; but a home automation system where the text parser works OK; but voice recognition is flaky as hell even for a relatively tiny set of possible commands and one user voice? That's more Walter Mitty than Tony Stark.
Is it really an AI when it just responds directly to commands? AI implies some kind of dynamic response... Not precalculated and preprogrammed
Twinstiq, game news
I know Mark wants to be Tony Stark... but he is more akin to Gus Gorman
Kind of my thought.
"I am Iron Douche."
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
He's more like the tar.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Not afraid of that happening. Zuck is no Tony Stark.
When I was a child I read about a children's cartoon, Scrooge McDuck, who had an automated home. The doors would open ahead of you, the kitchen would prepare your food, it had a traditional style barber, (but automated of course) a tailor that would take your measurements, and many other pleasant robotic friends.That has always been my vision of an automated home. Don't get me wrong, I know we're 30 years from that being possible. And I'm not complaining about these "home automation" apps. If you're into that sort of thing at an immense cost to privacy so be it. I just don't like things without physical automation being called "automated". Let's save the term "home automation" for when actual physical automation is in the home doing things for people.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Disney suing Facebook out of existence? I think most of us here would be okay with that.
But does he have enough money to crush Disney in court?
I've tried doing this, using various open source projects. I find it lacking, if others have more input to add that'd be great, but my findings... Sadly there are some windows/closed solutions that work better.
To start it all starts with speech recondition engines, called, STT, Speech To Text. Pocketsphinx, I haven't found one that really works. (you could "for limited use" use google's, or apple, but I'm excluding those two) Wit.ai has a dev one you can use pretty much unlimited that I find very inaccurate.
Then you need some engine to process and has out the text to form the work. Jasper, Simon, Mister House, etc. Mostly good enough and is easy enough to make or alter yourself. You can even pipe to wolfram as a last resort.
Now you need a Text To Speech, (TTS) while you can get good enough with espeak, MaryTTS is better but very slow and is java.. slow as crap on RPi's.
Hardware from x10, Insteon, raspberry Pi's, etc. Some notes:
Raspberry Pi's don't quite have enough resources, also lack audio input.
I have yet to find a microphone under $50 with any engine that I find "works". By works I mean not limited to very low noise and with in 3 feet. The real solutions you need a microphone that's really an array of microphones.
The hardware for home automation, IMO, Insteon is best, but not cheap.
Side things, look up magic mirror, Facial recognition.
So yea, can do lots of cool stuff, but most STT sucks, and without that you can't really get the rest past novelty.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Pardon me Jarvis, but may I ask who gives a damn? I'm sorry Zuck - may I call you Zuck? - outside yourself and some fanbois absolutely no one.
We used to carve our ICs out of wood.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
"He had to tell the system four times to turn the lights off before it got dark."
And *that* time he he called Jarvis by its nickname, "Alexa".
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
I think its cool that a guy with essentially unlimited resources wants to get his hands dirty and do something real for himself. It sounds like he didn't use an army of developers to develop a commercial product, but that he whipped up something on his own to gain a better understanding of what the challenges are for machine learning and a home control system.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Now we know we can hold a picture from that video of his parents up to his door camera and have access to his house!
Actually I think Mark is smarter than most people of Facebook give him credit for, it is not always the smartest people in the world that make the most money, and money is not the best way to grade people on how smart they are, but that does not make the guy an idiot. I would say he is much more tech savoy than many of the CEO of major tech companies and at least he seem to have a vision of were he wants to take the company even if you do not agree with it.