This Week In Bots: Thinking, Charming, Walking, And Life-Saving Droids

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.