Mark Zuckerberg plans to make his own AI butler - like Jarvis in Iron Man

Mark Zuckerberg wants to overtake Elon Musk to become the real-world version of Marvel superhero Tony Stark. The billionaire Facebook founder has expressed his desire (in a Facebook post, of course) to spend 2016 building an artificially intelligent assistant to help run his life at home and work – and directly compared it to Jarvis, the AI companion developed by Stark in the Iron Man films. Previous aims have included spending a year eating only meat from animals he killed himself in 2011, to read two books a month in 2015, and to learn Mandarin in a year in 2010. And when he declares one of the challenges, he goes hard on it: in October last year, he showed off his language abilities, delivering a 20-minute speech to students at Beijing's Tsinghua University entirely in Mandarin. Zuckerberg will start the project by "exploring what technology is already out there". Existing home-automation tools from companies such as Google's Nest, Phillips and Samsung all allow a fairly high level of control of a "smart home", and can be paired with voice control software, including that from Apple, Amazon and Massachusetts-based specialists Nuance.