Zuckerberg has spent 2016 building an Iron Man-style AI that controls his life.

Mark Zuckerberg has ended 2016 having completed his personal challenge to build a Jarvis-style AI to run his home.

Zuckerberg's Jarvis uses several AI techniques, including natural language processing, speech and face recognition, and reinforcement learning.

He announced at the start of the year that he wanted to build a simple AI that could control his home, including his lights, temperature, appliances, music and security. He also wanted it to "learn his tastes and patterns, learn new words and concepts, and even entertain Max" (his daughter.)

And now he has published a blog post explaining how he did it.

Zuckerberg's Jarvis uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recognition, face recognition, and reinforcement learning, written in Python, PHP and Objective C.

"Before I could build any AI, I first needed to write code to connect these systems, which all speak different languages and protocols," the Facebook founder explained. "I had to reverse engineer APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play.

"I programmed Jarvis on my computer, but in order to be useful I wanted to be able to communicate with it from anywhere I happened to be. That meant the communication had to happen through my phone, not a device placed in my home," he said.

He began by building a Messenger bot to communicate with Jarvis "because it was so much easier than building a separate app". He now texts the Jarvis bot and it can translate audio clips into commands. In the middle of the day, if someone arrives at his home, Jarvis also texts him an image to tell him who's there, or it can text him when he needs to go do something.

"I have always been optimistic about AI bots, but my experience with Jarvis has made me even more optimistic that we'll all communicate with bots like Jarvis in the future."

Zuckerberg has built the first version of the Jarvis app for iOS and plans to build an Android version soon too. "In the longer term, I'd like to explore teaching Jarvis how to learn new skills itself rather than me having to teach it how to perform specific tasks. If I spent another year on this challenge, I'd focus more on learning how learning works," Zuckerberg continued. "Finally, over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world.