November 13, 2005: The Future Of Babysitting

NEC in Japan has released PaPeRo, short for "Partner-type Personal Robot." It has a vocabulary of 3,000 phrases, can recognize faces, and has a host of other tricks. The manufacturer sees it as something that can help to tutor children.

Reportedly, they're also working on adding a "joke telling" routine. See, even robots want to quote Monty Python.
-- Paul Chapman