If you have ever read the comic books or watched the films, Tony Stark has a pretty cool virtual assistant named Jarvis who serves as his digital butler. Mark Zuckerberg seems to be inspired by the fictional digital butler and went out to set that as one of his challenges for the year.
Mark Zuckerberg is known for having a challenge for each year and for 2016, he “My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me to work. You can think of it like Jarvis in Iron Man”, Zuckerberg says in the post. Zuckerberg goes on to delve into the details about what he envisions the digital assistant’s duties where he expects it to control everything in his home, identify friends, be a digital nanny to his daughter Max and use it to visualize data in virtual reality just like Jarvis. The most interesting part of his project is how he will incorporate VR into the assistant so as to visualize data and this is similar to what Microsoft’s Holo Lens tries to do.
He intends to explore what technology is already out there, probably in the AI world and do all the coding. His company is not new in the AI world as they have used in the form of facial recognition in Moments and on the Facebook app and as a digital assistant in Facebook Messenger which is known as Facebook M. In this case however, Zuckerberg is undertaking the challenge as a hobby of sorts and he promises to share what he will learn with the world.
