Mark Zuckerberg Introduces Jarvis, His 2016 Personal Challenge

How much progress has Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made in fulfilling his New Year's resolution for 2016? Zuckerberg said in a Jan. 3 Facebook post that his personal challenge for 2016 was to use artificial intelligence to create a personal assistant, which he described as his own version of Jarvis from Iron Man. On Monday, he offered a detailed update on Jarvis, and highlights follow. So far this year, I've built a simple AI that I can talk to on my phone and computer; that can control my home, including lights, temperature, appliances, music and security; that learns my tastes and patterns; that can learn new words and concepts; and that can even entertain Max. It uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recognition, face recognition and reinforcement learning, written in Python, PHP and Objective C. In this note, I'll explain what I built and what I learned along the way. Before I could build any AI, I first needed to write code to connect these systems, which all speak different languages and protocols.