Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire technopreneur and a genius coder. We know that much. When the Facebook founder is not running his top internet company and leading 20,000+ employees, he’s coding future-scripting artificial intelligence projects for himself. Jarvis, his year long brainchild is finally out for viewing for us lesser mortals. The AI home assistant is a bold, ambitious endeavor to take smart homes to the next level.
Jarvis is smart home, personified – quite literally. The AI assistant, who invisibly works from the background – voiced over by the baritoned Morgan Freeman in first and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the second video – seems to control the Zuckerberg house. He fixes toasts, turns lights on and off, fetches clothes from Zuckerberg’s vast wardrobe options (ahem) and also slips in a joke or two.
The 2 videos Mark Zuckerberg has personally shared on Project Jarvis on his Facebook are inspiring and impressive for the technology on one hand, but dig deeper, and they almost feel like a feel-good sitcom. We usually don’t have access to billionaires’ lives – even if scripted for effect – like Zuckerberg lets us in on in these videos. We see him waking up in his almost relatably subtle bedroom, we hear him barging in his daughter Max’s nursery to see her trotting around in her pram and learning Chinese, but perhaps the best moments of the videos come from Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla’s ‘couply’ exchange.
Zuckerberg is not one to keep his wife or their household behind the wraps and the duo constantly appears together in videos and events. Whether it’s for talking about their common social causes, demonstrating Virtual Reality using their house as a canvas, or to talk about their daughter Max. The Jarvis video though presents them as your next door couple, if the said couple also happens to be famous billionaires. You see them exchange words like a normal couple. “Mark I’m trying to read” coos Priscilla from another room, as Mark dons a “oops I dun’ goofed!” look. The video ends with the couple enjoying some quality family time with daughter Max and that lovely mop of pet Beast in the bedroom, when Jaarvis is asked to play “the family song’ ‘as ‘Itsy Bitsy spider’ begins to roll. ( Don’t miss the Nickelback burn!)
In the next video, Zuckerberg talks about the little ‘glitch’ Jarvis had at first – that is listening to only his and not his wife’s commands. This delicate moment was also brought out in the video with a heartening and relatable exchange between the couple. “I’ll fix that’, says Mark to wife, with a look that perhaps every husband that forgot to bring milk home as instructed by the wife, has.
AI-based home assistants may not be a reality for the average person any time soon. They’re not even a reality for Zuckerberg himself as yet who clarified that the video was for demo purpose and there’s lots to be done.
But with Mark and his family as the biggest brand ambassador of his products, we have a leader who at some levels is not only highly relatable, but also proves that while future is closer than we think, some things remain the same. Trying to keep your better half happy, for one.