Now that Mark Zuckerberg has built Facebook up to be the biggest social network on the planet, he has time for other pursuits: supporting charities, buying Oculus, and now developing his own artificially intelligent personal assistant in the style of Jarvis from the Iron Man films.
It's sort of a New Year's resolution for Zuckerberg: "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work," he writes. "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man."
The system is eventually going to handle everything from playing music to identifying friends at the front door, according to the Facebook founder. Baby monitoring and virtual reality data representations were also mentioned in Zuckerberg's post.
Automated for the people
A lot of this technology is already available in the form of devices like the Amazon Echo and standards such as Apple HomeKit, but it sounds like Zuckerberg wants to tie it all together and give it his own spin. Oh, and he'll be sharing his adventures with the world at large.
"This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself," he says. "I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year."
Facebook engineers are also busy adding AI capabilities to Messenger, so it looks like we're all set for an automated, voice-controlled future. Perhaps in 2017 Zuckerberg can start work on the armoured suit as well.
- Remember Samsung's limited edition Iron Man phone?
