Zuckerberg's Jarvis home AI is like an Alexa that learns your musical tastes

Mark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances. Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be "easier than [he] expected" in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon's Echo. To be fair, most (all?) Echo owners didn't build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that's what Zuckerberg set out to do, coding his own personal Jarvis using Python, PHP and Objective C, and incorporating machine learning techniques including language processing, speech recognition and face recognition. The Facebook CEO also had to wrangle a bunch of connected devices that don't necessarily talk to each other out of the box, including Sonos, Spotify, a Samsung TV, a Crestron smart home and lighting system, a Nest cam and more. And once these were all tied together, Zuckerberg also had to build a way to translate natural language requests made as though you were talking too another person into commands that could operate all of the above.