A little while ago I was strangely repulsed by the movie A.I. The whole thing about artifical humans and their emotional lives just hasn't had much appeal since Collodi's Pinocchio, and that story was a bit different. The reader could assume that magic of some sort came into play, because Gepetto isn't shown to take the everyday route of manufacturing a little boy out of bits of corpses and circuits. But I hadn't considered just how pervasive this mania for emotionally-charged mechanical toys was in the culture. It now seems as if the Japanese have introduced "Wakaramu" to take up the house-sitting slack!

This "Wakaramu" (or rather "Wakamaru",ワカマル,) knows 10,000 words and can take messages, identify people, etc. It joins a team that already includes My Spoon, which feeds people, and Hospi, which hangs around the hospital making itself useful:

This "human recognition system" that detects a human by the "face" and "leg" information makes it possible for the robot to slow down, shunt and offer sympathetic comments as it spots a person on its way.

I don't know why they put quotation marks around the word "face". I'm also not sure how people are going to react to sympathy from a robot, but maybe that's its proper source.