Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has programmed his AI butler to ignore commands from his wife, answering only to him, the billionaire revealed in a recent interview.
The butler, which is effectively a voice-activated home system that can control features around the estate including temperature, lighting, and gate access, is currently only controlled by Zuckerberg, though he hinted that his wife could have access to it later on.
“[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,” said Zuckerberg. “Which is one of the perks of being an engineer, you can do that.”
“I’ll give her access once I’m done,” he added afterwards.
The system was announced in January on his official Facebook account.
“Every year, I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook. My challenges in recent years have been to read two books every month, learn Mandarin and meet a new person every day,” said Zuckerberg in his post.
My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.
I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her. On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.