Building Jarvis-Mark Zuckerberg

My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home -- like Jarvis in Iron Man.

My goal was to learn about the state of artificial intelligence -- where we're further along than people realize and where we're still a long ways off. These challenges always lead me to learn more than I expected, and this one also gave me a better sense of all the internal technology Facebook engineers get to use, as well as a thorough overview of home automation.

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.