Many have been mesmerized by Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, he is the complete package: wealthy, genius, handsome, and charming. Not only that, he also wields the most sophisticated and powerful man-made armored suit. In sum, he is probably what many men would aspire to be.

Central to Mr. Stark’s jet-set lifestyle is J.A.R.V.I.S (stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System), an artificially intelligent digital personal assistant which helps Mr. Stark’s run his multi-billions businesses and assists him in designing his iron suits. More than just intelligent, J.A.R.V.I.S is able to converse and understand Mr. Stark and execute his commands to control everything from his iron suit down to his personal computer. So much for a science-fiction movie.

Today, not just in science-fiction, one can actually get a taste of living up the Tony Stark lifestyle by having a J.A.R.V.I.S-like digital personal assistant. At the forefront of such technology is Apple’s Siri with speech recognition feature that can be utilized to control, activate, and deactivate different features of Apple devices such as iPhone. More recently, Apple has brought this technology to a new a height. Catching-up on the trends of internet of things (IoT) and smart-home appliances, Apple launched HomeKit, an iOS framework that allows users to configure and control their smart-home appliances through Apple devices. Along with the launch of HomeKit, a number of third party vendors release smart-home appliances that are compatible with iOS.

If you combine Apple’s HomeKit framework, smart-home appliances and Siri, you will find yourself closer than ever to having a real-life J.A.R.V.I.S that not only controls your phone but also your house. One cool yet simple HomeKit device you could try and play around with is the Phillips Hue Lights. The hue light is able to emit different shades of colors of lighting. If you install a number of these hue lights together in a room, you can produce a particular lighting effect to create a certain ambience and help you ease into a particular mood.

In order to control the hue lights using Siri through your iPhone, you have to connect your iPhone and the hue lights to an intermediary device called Phillip Hue Bridge. You can actually use any of your Apple devices (iPod, iPad, and even Apple Watch) to control the hue lights as long as they are connected to the hue bridge and iCloud. Phillip’s in-built software also allows you to assign the hue lights into different groups for control purposes. You can then put lights that are placed in the same room under a group and control them simultaneously.

Here are some cool commands you could try out with the set-up:

“Turn on/off the lights in the living room.”
"Turn the living room lights all the way up."
"Make the lights blue in the bedroom."
"Hey Siri, set my reading scene."

You can now start living out your Iron Man dream!

one concern i have with ipad pro is the huge vibration it produce when watching video, the entire back panel of the ipad is vibrating vigorously and seem as if it is going to break off. I believe its the compromises we get for having a large and thin ipad. Software aspect, i dont really see any different between this and the ''lower end'' tablet like ipad mini. Both run smoothly, no significant different. But, considering the price of ipad pro, i personally would get a ipad mini, as it is more portable and comfortable to use (just my personal preference)