New York, Jan. 4 (Reuters): Mark Zuckerberg wants to build an artificially intelligent assistant in 2016 to help run his home and assist him at work, the Facebook Inc founder and chief executive said yesterday.
Zuckerberg, who commits to a new personal challenge every year, revealed his plan in a Facebook post.
"You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to an artificially intelligent butler who appears in the Marvel comic books and movies.
While Zuckerberg was keen to emphasise the similarities between his plan and the fictional Jarvis (which stands for "Just A Rather Very Intelligent System"), others have pointed to a less flattering comparison: Oscar Isaac's character, Nathan Bateman, in last year's thriller Ex Machina.
Bateman is the founder of a vague search engine/social network hybrid called Bluebook but keeps his lifelike AI, Ava, locked in his basement.
Zuckerberg will start the project by exploring existing technology, he wrote. He will then begin teaching the technology to understand his voice so that it will learn to control everything in his home, such as music, lights and temperature.
His plans also include teaching the assistant to let friends into his home by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell, Zuckerberg wrote.
The assistant will visualise data to support Zuckerberg at work, he wrote.
"This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself," Zuckerberg wrote. "I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year."
Other challenges Zuckerberg has taken on in recent years have included reading two books every month and learning Mandarin and meeting a new person everyday. His wife Priscilla Chan is a Chinese.
"I'll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max's (his daughter's) room that I need to check on when I'm not with her," he wrote.
Zuckerberg said the system would help him visualise data in virtual reality and help him build better services, besides leading his company.
"On the work side, it'll help me visualise data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organisations more effectively," he wrote.
The tech billionaire said a part of the motivation behind this year's challenge was the reward of building things yourself.
"Every year, I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook. The theme for his challenge this year is invention," he posted.
Noting that he spends a lot of time at Facebook working with engineers to build new things, Zuckerberg said some of the "most rewarding work involves getting deep into the details of technical projects."
Last month Zuckerberg made headlines for plans to donate 99 per cent of his stake in Facebook.
He had to defend his philanthropic venture - launched to celebrate the birth of his daughter - after critics argued that it could provide a way for him to avoid paying tax on the sale of his shares.
