Nao, from young French firm Aldebaran Robotics, is one of the better known small humanoid education and research robots--but he's about to be replaced: By Nao Next Gen. The new robot is an evolution of the existing design, but it may also be a revolution because the number of tweaks is significant. As well as boosting the in-robot cameras to a twin HD-video solution, the team has given the bot an upgraded Atom 1.6GHz CPU, a better walking algorithm, better control of its servo's torque so the robots movements are more fluid and powerful, and a few other tweaks. But most significantly they've added in voice recognition from Nuance--the same innovative firm whose technology is behind the amazing powers of Apple's Siri digital personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. Of course Nao will react differently to voice commands than Siri, and it's unlikely to call your wife or set up a calendar entry on voice command.

Meka is intended to design a robot that builds emotional links between humans and the machines themselves, and at the recent Intelligent Robots and Systems event, Professor Sentis of the University of Texas showed off Meka's most recent iteration. Unlike other androids, like the hyper-realistic Geminoid series, Meka's looks are deliberately non-realistic, right down to his glowing ears. Would that make you trust it more than a robot that's creepily realistic? This week the tech world has been blown-away by Siri, the (slightly) artificially-intelligent voice-activated assistant in Apple's new iPhone--particularly because the way Siri is programmed makes it able to understand natural language to a certain extent and even understand context, in a limited way. But Siri is nothing compared to the research of Osamu Hasegawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoît Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. The agreement significantly enhances the scope and quality of Espacenet, the public patent information service on the EPO website, by adding an automatic translation tool. "With this agreement, Japan and the EPO have reached another milestone in their long-standing co‑operation to develop efficient structures and services in the international patent system", says EPO President Battistelli. "Making Japanese patents available in English not only brings a wealth of technological information to users in Europe and elsewhere. It also offers an effective and reliable way for engineers, inventors and scientists to take account of the latest Japanese technology when defining their intellectual property strategies, and thus improve the focus and quality of their own work."

Don't get excited about buying the new robots created by Japanese company Dentsu in conjunction with Toyota and the University of Tokyo -- they won't be hitting stores anytime soon. However, do get excited that one of them, namely the white-helmeted droid Kirobo (shown above, left), will actually be launched into orbit as part of a Japan Space Agency mission to the ISS on August 4th. In fact, he and his backup Mirata were endowed with voice recognition, natural language processing, speech synthesis, realistic body language and facial recognition for that very reason. They'll be participating in the "world's first conversational experiment" between people and robots in space, while also mixing it up with kids on earth with educational activities. Hopefully, the astronauts won't give Kirobo any HAL 9000-like control of the station, though the cute'bots seem malice-free, saying they "wanted to create a future where humans and robots live together and get along." Check it out for yourself in the video after the break.

Aldebaran Robotics' Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers, but it now has a proper successor. Aldebaran took the wraps off its new and improved Nao Next Gen robot today, touting features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What's more, while robot's outward appearance hasn't changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions. As before, the robot is aimed squarely at researchers and developers, but the Aldebaran's chairman notes that the company is continuing to pursue its goal of providing a Nao intended for individuals -- a goal he notes is being aided by the contributions from its developer program. Check out the gallery below and the video after the break for a closer look.

Hoping to compete with the Siris of the world, Micromax has announced its new Superfone A50 Ninja alongside a novel feature dubbed AISHA -- which is short for Artificial Intelligence Speech Handset Assistant. Similar to Cupertino's personal secretary, AISHA vows to help folks with every-day elements such as making calls, setting up calendar events and even reporting what the weather looks like. Much to our disappointment, however, the A50 Ninja runs a not-so-new flavor of Android -- Gingerbread to be exact -- and Micromax left out any mention of Android 4.0. On the specs front, the dual-SIM Superfone sports a 3.1-inch display (mum's the word on the resolution), a two-megapixel shooter, Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities and an unspecified 650MHz processor. All in all, thanks to its 4,999 rupees (around $95) budget price, we can't imagine you'd complain too much.

There may be plenty of robots out there able to avoid or overcome obstacles, but we can't say we've seen too many that are actually able to use obstacles to their advantage. That's the claim to fame of this so-called HRP-2 robot built by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, however, which is able to detect objects around it and discern how they can be used to help it with a specific task -- like leaning on a table to help balance while kicking a ball, for instance. As New Scientist points out, whether intentional or not, the end result is a robot that behaves remarkably like an elderly person -- see for yourself in the video after the break.

It's been awhile since we've talked about the remote controlled robot jockeys used in Arabian camel racing, but a recent scandal that has rocked the camel-racing world compels us to revisit the topic. The Dubai police discovered that some shady characters have been selling robot jockeys equipped with stun guns to "encourage" camels to run faster. We're pretty sure that the animals don't need any more incentive to run -- they already have a robot whipping them -- and it's good to see that the powers-that-be agree with us, as the two men selling the machines were arrested. Now that our dromedary friends need no longer fear being tased in the name of sport, we only have to worry about over-zealous peace officers using them on all of us.

PEOPLE commonly attach names to machines, from cars to PCs, especially if they use them regularly. Robots are proving no exception. Floor-cleaning robots get named, as do the bomb-defusal robots that have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when they break down or get blown up, their users have even been known to mourn. Robots are getting more capable in leaps and bounds.

IN THE early days of computing, information was put into computers by flipping switches. After this came the relative sophistication of loading programs and data by means of punched cards or punched paper-tape. These were followed in their turn by such devices as the keyboard, the mouse, the trackball, the joystick, the touchpad and the touch-sensitive screen. Throughout all this, speech--the most natural, and perhaps the most effective, interface between people and computers--has remained largely neglected. Apart from some modest developments in software for desktop dictation in the 1990s, the only time most people have talked to their computers has been when cursing them.