Depending upon your age you may think of a robot as Robbie from Lost in Space or Data from Star Trek. But either way these are still charaters on the TV and artificial intellegence (AI) is still a foriegn concept to most people. AI has slowly been sneeking up on us while we weren't looking. If you are reading this note you are familiar with Google. Google and many of the other technologies we see on the web are based on AI. But these are still not the personal AI assistant that many people have imagined. But there is progress. Researchers at Britain's University of Leeds have developed a system that teaches itself to play games by observing human players. Most AI systems work on a set of rules that are presented to the computer by the human user. Human's on the other hand learn by observation. Now we have a computer that learns like a human. Check out the article in "New Scientist" at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6914.
On another front, researchers at Austrailia's Swinburne University are working on computer generted avatar's that could sit in for you on your next conference call...
Professor Ryszard Kowalczyk and Professor Jun Han are working on research that they hope will lead to intelligent agents that can fill in for humans. Not just being an automated attendent of voice mail fame. But automate process which currently require human intellence and decision making. You can read more on this work at http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1451684505;fp;16;fpid;0.
Finally, if you would like to try your hand at talking with a robot try talking with A.L.I.C.E. at http://www.alicebot.org/. Alice is the winner of the 2004 Loebner Price for machine intelligence. The Loebner Price is based on a test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. For more details check out the Loebner Prize site at http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html.