Tech News

Zuck’s building a personal assistant out of existing tools; interested?

Every year Mark Zuckerberg challenges himself to a new resolution. The past few years have included learning to speak a different language, reading more, and being more active. This year’s resolution is a little more… intense as he seeks to build a personal assistant.

Lauren Flanigan

Published

January 11, 2016

A different kind of resolution

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s current personal assistant may be out of a job by the end of 2016. That’s because the Facebook co-founder and CEO is looking to build his very own version of Jarvis from Iron Man: a robotic assistant.

Read also: Facebook piloting “M,” a Siri-esque personal assistant

His previous challenges have included learning to speak Mandarin, and reading two books every month. But with this years theme being technology, it was only right that he outdid his previous efforts.

A coding challenge

Zuckerberg wrote: [My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI (artificial intelligence) to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.

I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home–music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her. On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR

(virtual reality) to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.
Every challenge has a theme, and this year’s theme is invention.

At Facebook, I spend a lot of time working with engineers to build new things. Some of the most rewarding work involves getting deep into the details of technical projects. I do this with Internet.org when we discuss the physics of building solar-powered planes and satellites to beam down Internet access.
I do this with Oculus VR when we get into the details of the controllers or the software we’re designing. I do this with Messenger when we discuss our AI to answer any question you have. But it’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that.
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This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I’m looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.]

I hope he’s successful. I would definitely invest in a robotic assistant that helps with my home and business, what about you?