Facebook’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg is known for coming up with eccentric resolutions for a calendar year and for 2016, he decided that one of his goals is to build a virtual assistant for his house.
This was his goal as described in a post in January this year:
My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.
If you’ve watched the IronMan movies, you will instantly recognize the brilliant virtual assistant Tony Stark has and Mark wanted to create something that is similar to that. We are in the 10 month of the year and Mark Zuckerberg decided to ask this question to his audience.
AI systems (and especially virtual assistants) are voiced by humans to make them feel as human as possible, or else you will be served with a robotic face that can be quite jarring at first. Mark’s query of course generated a lot of buzz and here are some of the people who endorsed themselves or were endorsed by others:
First, Jarvis in the Iron Movies was voiced by Paul Bettany and people thought it was only fitting for him to be given the job
Robert Downey Jr (Who pays Iron Man) had conditions for Mark if he gave him the job to voice his AI
Well after that we started to see some notable people being mentioned like:
1. Morgan Freeman (You remember his voiceover on the Shawshank Redemption)
2. David Attenborough who is famous for voicing nature documentaries
3. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist (Mark loved this idea)
4. T-Pain (Zuckerberg is not too apprehensive about autotuned AI)
5. Hodor from the Game of Thrones ( Zuck quickly dismissed that option)
Well Zuckerberg clearly got a lot of options from people out there and judging by the fact that he wants it to perform features like run the house or help him “visualize data in VR”, it would be interesting to see what person he’ll pick for the job.
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