When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When neural networks are hot in the field of machine learning, everything looks like a pattern-matching problem. When you leave the milk out, a robot will tell you.

Watch-Bot is basically your mom, if your mom was a Kinect sensor programmed with unsupervised learning algorithms. It's trained on data from videos of regular people doing regular people things. Based on that data, it "knows" if something is out of place. Did you leave a book out? Forget to turn the TV off? Leave something in the microwave? Watch-Bot knows. Also, Watch-Bot communicates via laser pointer, so that's friendly.

Watch-Bot was built by researchers from Cornell and Stanford, and the underlying machine learning stuff is being extended to learn from YouTube tutorials.