While speaking in Italy Monday, Zuckerberg enlightened the attending crowd with a few more details about his JARVIS-like helper, saying he’s hoping to have a working demo up and running by September. In addition to its toast-making skills, which became public knowledge in June, the AI bot is also now able to control the lights and thermostat in Zuckerberg’s home. It was while revealing this new feature that the Facebook boss launched into how he’s built the thing to only listen to him.
“[That’s] much to the chagrin of my wife, who can now not control the temperature because it is programmed to only listen to my voice,” he joked, according to Recode. “Which is one of the perks of being an engineer, you can do that.”
The comment elicited an expected laugh from the audience before Zuckerberg reneged a bit on his claim saying, “I’ll give her access once I’m done.”
Despite him currently being the only one to control his home’s temperature, the AI butler also reportedly has the ability to open the home’s front gate as Zuckerberg approaches it via facial recognition technology. Though the system only exists by way of brief explanations from Facebook’s first-in-command himself, it’s starting to sound like his futuristic vision of an AI-powered assistant is as close to reality as ever.
