What happened to the vision of technology helping us with our chores?

Isn't it funny to see those old television clips from Tomorrow's World (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/tw) back in the early 1960s? According to the presenters of the day, by now we should all be living a life of leisure, aided, in the main, by robots that are happy to maintain 24-hour-a-day housework rosters.

Of course, this vision of a Utopian society free of the drudgery of work remains just that - a vision.

The closest we can get to automated housework these days is the ownership of a dishwasher and one of the ingenious robot vacuum cleaners recently launched by British company, Dyson (http://dc06.dyson.com).

Like the exploration of space, the advancement of robot technology is nowhere near the point that many predicted it would be by now. Who can forget the vision of supercomputer, HAL, from Arthur C. Clarke's (http://www.acclarke.co.uk/) science fiction classic, 2001 A Space Odyssey?

Next year we reach that fabled date and humanity will still be some way away from computer software that can accurately recognise the human voice and put it into print, let alone respond with "I can tell from your voice harmonics that you're badly upset. Why don't you take a stress pill and get some rest?" as HAL was prone to say.

Microsoft's next version of its Office suite of software is to have in-built voice recognition for not only voice-to-text, but actually as a command option, too.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that similar plans are probably under way for a future version of their operating system, too.

Call me a cynic, but I can see it now - "Computer, open last document," we will say, and Windows 2003 will respond by promptly shutting itself down.

Last year, Japanese electronics giant Sony released a robot dog for the home that was probably as close to mass-produced artificial intelligence as we have so far got.

The Aibo (http://www.us.aibo.com) is a cutesy metallic canine that learns from its owner and shows some fairly believable signs of animal behaviour and emotion. In Japan, at least, where living conditions are often confined, robot dogs and other creatures are rapidly becoming accepted as regular pets.

For those of us who failed to bag an Aibo because they are a little pricey at 2,000 (that's a lot of dog food), there are alternative means by which we can become the proud owner of a household 'robot,' though I use the term loosely.

Some smart bods at Carnegie University in the US have published a 'recipe' for a robot and offer advice on where to find the parts. The whole thing will set you back about 200 (or considerably less if you know someone who will donate a Palm Pilot - which is a big hint as to what actually controls the thing).

Budding robot-eers should check out the Web site at www.cs.cmu.edu/reshko/PILOT/.

What you will end up with is a tiny battery-powered device that can turn away from any objects it encounters as it scurries around your living room.

Thrilling stuff, indeed.