Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is bullish on the future of artificial intelligence and has been for years.
Not only has he made it a priority to learn about and invest in AI himself, but he has consistently recommended other entrepreneurs do the same. And if the ABC’s “Shark Tank” star had to start a side hustle business today, that’s where Cuban would turn.
“I would become an expert in scripting for Alexa and Google Home and Cortana and go to any place that sold devices they supported and show them how much more they could do with a few hours of personalization,” he tells CNBC Make It.
For example, enabling the iRobot Home skill allows you to simply say, “Alexa, ask Roomba to start cleaning,” to get your smart vacuum going. Or you can enable a skill like CNBC’s Flash Briefing to hear the day’s headlines.
“Alexa skills and scripting Alexa skills is really, really easy. But everybody thinks it’s really, really hard. And so that disconnect is a great opportunity,” Cuban previously told Recode’s Peter Kafka in 2019.
Amazon provides free resources to teach anyone how to create skills for its platform. Amazon has an Alexa Skills Kit of tutorials online, for example.
“We think it should be simple for people of all skill levels to build for Alexa,” Rob Pulciani, the vice president of Amazon Alexa international, previously told CNBC Make It.
Amazon currently has over 40,000 skills for Alexa built by third-party developers.
“If I were 16 years old, I would learn Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft stuff and learn how to create scripts,” he said. “Then go to my neighbors’ homes … and charge $30 an hour to set it up in their house.”
If Mark Cuban was 16-years-old, he would learn “Google Home, I would learn Amazon Alexa… And I’d start learning how to create scripts,” and charge people to set it up in their homes #CES pic.twitter.com/BGiRTSmvIx
— Variety (@Variety) January 9, 2020
At the conference he also compared the future of AI to the rise of the internet.
