We were trying to get in touch with our internet service provider. I can't remember the reason. But we contacted the company through its website chat system. My partner was typing, and I noticed his language was unusually clipped, devoid of the words "please", or "thank you". "You don't have to be so rude," I said.

If you had your very own home robot, what would you want it to do, exactly? Yeah, me too, but that kind of robot is a long, long ways off. Consider Jibo, essentially a dancing Amazon Alexa. And Kuri, a miniaturized R2-D2 that roams around your house taking pictures. If that doesn't sound particularly impressive to you, well, the market felt the same way.

Its eyes, a complex configuration of cyan dots on a black, rounded screen of a face, sleepily open and it lets out a digitised approximation of a yawn. A compact device that looks like a blend of a forklift truck and PC monitor bred for maximum cuteness, the robot rolls blearily off its charging station on a pair of dinky treads before tilting its screen-face and noticing I'm there. Its eyes widen, then curve at the bottom as if making way for an unseen smile. "Daaaaan!" it announces with a happy jiggle, sounding not unlike Pixar Animation Studios' lovable robot creation, Wall-E. A message flashes up on my iPhone telling me that it, or rather he (being the gender that its manufacturer, Anki, has assigned Cozmo) wants to play a game. Cozmo's head droops, his eyes form into a pair of sadly reclining crescent moons and he sighs. But he quickly cheers up, giving a happy jiggle when I comply with his request for a fist bump and tap my knuckles against his eagerly raised arm.

Nearly every step wrought havoc upon the prototype walker's frame. Designed to activate landmines in the most direct means possible, the EOD robot was nevertheless persistent enough to pick itself back up after each explosion and hobble forth in search of more damage. It continued on until it could barely crawl, its broken metal belly scraping across the scorched earth as it dragged itself by a single remaining limb. The scene proved to be too much for those in attendance. The colonel in charge of the demonstration quickly put an end to the macabre display, reportedly unable to stand the scene before him.

Straight out of the box, Anki's adorable robot Cozmo plays games, fist bumps, and uses its big, blue digital eyes to convey convincing emotional range. And its brain uses machine learning, so it gets more savvy as you play with it. An update lets Cozmo start teaching you new skills as well. Anki' new app Coding Lab uses Cozmo to teach kids (and kids at heart) how to program. Cozmo was not designed to teach, but that's what makes the little rolling bot so good at it.

Cozmo, the product of San Francisco-based startup Anki, received plenty of press when it made its July debut. Since then, the firm has demoed the artificially intelligent little robot's SDK, formally launched pre-orders, and prepared thousands of the AI-powered companions for shipment later this year. A few "escaped" early, though, including one that found its way to the New York offices of Digital Trends. For the better part of two weeks, we've been playing with it to find out just what makes it tick. The answer is simpler than it might appear at first glance.

For grown adults, there's no better feeling than coming across a gadget or toy that makes you feel young again – that's what makes Anki's newest robot, Cozmo, so charming. The robot, reminiscent of Wall-E and Eve in one body, is designed to look and feel like a Pixar character come to life. His facial animations and body movements are incredibly fun to interact with, but underneath all this cuteness are some serious robotics that Anki wants to share with developers and researchers to turn Cozmo into the ultimate learning tool. When Cozmo becomes available in October, Anki will release SDKs to let developers create their own Cozmo functions. The SDK simplifies complex functions, like path planning and facial recognition, into a single line of code which makes complicated tasks extremely easy to program.

A tiny robot sits beside the laptop, looking like one of those anthropomorphic automobiles that show up in Pixar's Cars movies. Almost instantly, it wakes up, rolls down the table, and counts to four. This is Cozmo--an artificially intelligent toy robot unveiled late last month by San Francisco startup Anki--and Tappeiner, one of the company's founders, is programming the little automaton to do new things. The programs are simple--he also teaches Cozmo to stack blocks--but they're supposed to be simple. Tappeiner is using Anki's newly unveiled software development kit--an SDK, in coder parlance--that he says even the greenest of coders can use to tweak the behavior of the toy robot.

Remember Cozmo, the cute little AI-powered robot that can recognize faces, become bored if you ignore it, or throw a tantrum when it loses a game? Turns out it's capable of far more than Anki, the San Francisco-based creators of the'bot, let on last week. On Monday, the startup announced the launch of a software development kit that will expose Cozmo's artificial intelligence smarts -- including facial recognition, positional tracking, and text-to-speech synthesis -- to any developer keen on tapping into them. Anki's motivations for doing so, explained Anki's president and co-founder Hanns Tappeiner at a showcase in New York City, are twofold. First, the company wants to distill Cozmo's deluge of mechanical parts, which include a gyroscope, accelerometer, cameras, a drop sensor, and four motorized joints, down to easy-to-understand functions that novice programmers can understand.

We were all quite pumped a few weeks ago when Anki announced its plan to move beyond smartphone controlled cars into emotionally intelligent robots. At the time of the announcement Anki indicated that it would release an SDK with the inclusion of Cozmo, but until now details on what that SDK would be were sparse. Now we know, and the SDK is so jam-packed with goodies it could turn Cozmo into the Commodore 64 of robotics--a device that changes how people interact with abstruse technology. The Commodore 64 changed the way we thought about computers. Before that ugly box got plugged into TVs across the United States computers were still for the very rich, the very smart, and the ladies programming the IBM beasts that took up entire floors of buildings.