AI is one step closer. A project for the past three years of Georgia Institute of Technology's Socially Intelligent Machines lab, Simon the Robot is now able to learn new tasks. Through face recognition and sound localization, the achievement of Simon comes from not needing to be preprogrammed with tasks.

Interestingly, the main challenge was system integration. It uses Open Source Computer Vision and off the shelf technology for the recognition software.

Of course, there's the big, shiny, red button to turn Simon off in case something goes wrong....