Alto is a little teachable object, used to introduce the basic concepts of machine learning in a simple way.
Anyone can teach Alto to recognize different objects by pressing one of the buttons on its side - once Alto sees something it knows, it will point at it with one of its arms.
The project was developed with Google Creative Lab and released as an open project, so anyone could peak into the code and hardware, and eventually create their own with simple off-the-shelf components.
Technically it's a simple image classifier that is re-trained every time the buttons are pressed, using transfer learning. All the code runs on the edge on a Raspberry Pi and a Coral USB accelerator board.
Curious? Alto is an open project, drawing files and code are available on GitHub.