Cyber servant

The notion of a computer with human attributes has long been standard sci-fi fodder. But now engineers from Philips in Germany aim to bring the concept into the home courtesy of the Smart Companion: a nodding, talking and listening robot designed to act as a friendly link between the human and the digital world.

Hans Driessen, spokesman for Philips Home Dialogue Systems (HDS), which developed the Smart Companion, said the device combines advances in robotics and image processing, as well as face, gesture and speech recognition, to provide an unthreatening and intuitive interface with the digital devices in a user’s home.

Driessen said the system has numerous applications. For instance, in response to a voice command, it can retrieve and read e-mails, playback audio, or get the latest pictures from a computer’s hard drive and display them on a television screen. It can also use a broadband internet connection to retrieve information from the web, effectively acting as the user’s browser.