Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg creates virtual butler

Founder and CEO of social media giant, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg on Monday introduced the world to "Jarvis", an artificial intelligence system he created during his spare time, which can choose and play music, turn on lights, and recognise visitors, and deciding whether to open the front door.

The new system ''Jarvis'', which Zuckerberg had created in 100 hours over the past year, was named after the virtual assistant in the Iron Man movies, and according to Zuckerberg, it could be a step towards a new product, but the Facebook chief cautioned that the system was customised for his house.

Zuckerberg announced results of the project, a personal challenge he set for himself this year, as digital home assistants by Google and Amazon.com compete for holiday sales and are expected to outsell popular emerging gadgets such as virtual reality headsets and drones.

According to Zuckerberg, creating Jarvis proved humanity is "both closer and farther off" from an AI breakthrough than we imagine.

Computers are getting very good at picking out patterns, such as face recognition, but it is difficult to teach them new things, he wrote.

"Everything I did this year - natural language, face recognition, speech recognition and so on - are all variants of the same fundamental pattern recognition techniques," he wrote.

"But even if I spent 1000 more hours, I probably wouldn't be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own."

By the end of the year 2016, Jarvis was able to respond to text and voice commands and could run music, air conditioning, doors, and other systems. It could also recognise visitors, start a toaster and even shoot T-shirts from a cannon in his closet.

He wrote that, with more effort to broaden the use of Jarvis' beyond his own house, the experiment "could be a great foundation to build a new product."

A dearth of internet-connected devices, lack of common standards for connected devices to communicate, and challenges related to speech recognition and machine learning were all obstacles, he said and at the same time, he said challenges lead to eureka moments.

Adjustments made to help Jarvis recognise context in commands ultimately helped the system respond to less specific requests in a better fashion, such as asking the system to "play me some music".

"I've found we use these more open-ended requests more frequently than more specific asks. No commercial products I know of do this today, and this seems like a big opportunity," he wrote.

Reuters