In January 2016, Facebook, co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, as one of his new-year personal challenges, had fancied building an Iron Man comics-inspired Jarvis, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based digital assistant. On Monday, Zuckerberg, while hosting the Townhall Q&A session in Rome, revealed that his pet-project is almost ready and is excited to show the demo to the world next month.
Zuckerberg's smart home automation-system is said to boast state-of-art AI technology. It is intuitive enough to interact orally, like having a normal conversation with another person and get tasks done such as controlling lights, temperature without having to open an app on smartphone or any other smart device.
Zuckerberg further added that his AI-system is intelligent enough to automatically recognise his face and open the house gate without having to type-in passwords.
On a lighter note, he also joked about his wife getting irked over the automated system, as it is programmed only to listen to his voice. But he promised her full access to the system once he completed it.
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Fellow technology giant Amazon has long been involved in the development of AI. It has already released a portable digital assistant, "Echo," to the market (HERE). It looks like a fancy cylindrical-shaped Bluetooth speaker and has some really cool tricks up its sleeves.
It is powered by Alexa Voice Service and can interact with users orally and assist them in basic routines like making a grocery shopping list, birthday reminders, set timers, alarms, play music of your choice (via Wi-Fi internet connection), weather updates. User can even ask for scores of a game. What's more interesting is that Amazon routinely pushes updates adding new features to the Echo.
Echo houses seven different microphones for listening and a 360º omni-directional audio grille for speaking. The only limitation is that it is a stationary device; it has to be moved whenever the user needs it. Here's where Facebook home AI-system comes in to play. It is believed that a user can interact with it at any location in the house.
After Virtual Reality (VR) technology, AI is touted to be the next big thing to come out of the Silicon Valley's start-up revolution. It is expected to have a huge impact on smart-home technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) in general.
Also read: Anglr Tracker: New IoT technology promises to make fishing more fun
Watch Mark Zuckerberg Townhall Q&A Session in Rome here:
