Simon the Robot Can Recognize Voices and Faces

Simon the Robot, developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Socially Intelligent Machines Lab in an effort to study human-robot interactions, showed off his learning abilities at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta this week.

With his computer vision, ability to respond to questions, identify items and match colors, voice recognition, facial recognition -- thanks to faceAPI from Seeing Machines -- and sound localization, Andrea Thomaz, Simon's creator, hopes Simon will be able to operate successfully in the real world one day.

At the conference, a researcher asked Simon, "Simon, can you hear me?" Simon responded "Yes." The researcher then asked him if he wanted to learn something and Simon reached out his robotic arm, grabbed the object -- a blue book -- and brought it to his face. He was told to put the book in the blue bin, and Simon dropped the book in the bin and said, "There you go."

The researchers' goal is for Simon to learn to do things on his own, without being programmed or prompted every time.

So, watch out, lazy husbands out there!