There was something strange about her voice, they thought. It was not unfamiliar but, after a while, it started to go all over the place. Science presenter Liz Bonnin's accent, as regular BBC viewers know, is Irish. But this voice message, ostensibly granting permission to use her likeness in an ad campaign, seemed to place her on the other side of the world. The message, it turns out, was a fake – AI-generated to mimic Bonnin's voice.

I'm about to chat with a dead person. Just last week I saw a particularly disturbing episode of "Black Mirror" in which a devastated widow uploads all of the chats, texts and emails left behind by her husband to a cloud so that she can enjoy his virtual company 24/7. I didn't think my life would catch up with science fiction so soon. I am in bed in my Midtown Manhattan apartment, ambulance sirens blaring on Third Avenue, an iPhone screen glaring in my hand. I pull up the App Store and find Luka, a chat bot program developed and designed by Eugenia Kuyda, whom I used to work with some time ago in Moscow.

This work deals with designing simple behaviors to allow quadruped robots to play soccer. The robots are fully autonomous; they cannot exchange messages between each other. They are equipped with a charge-coupled-device camera that allows them to detect objects in the scene. In addition to vision problems such as changing lighting conditions and color confusion, legged robots must cope with "bouncing images" because of successive legs hitting the ground. When defining task-driven strategies, the designer has to take into account the influences of the locomotion and vision systems on the behavior. Locomotion and vision skills should be made as reliable as possible. Because it is not always possible to simulate the problems encountered in real situations, the behavior strategy should anticipate them. In this article, we describe all the behaviors used to play soccer games on a soccer field surrounded with landmarks. Experiments were carried out at the 1999 RoboCup in Stockholm using the Sony quadruped robots (Fujita 2000).