July 19, 2005— A new tabletop robot will soon help consumers remotely control all of their home electronic equipment, from the Internet to MP3 players.

Philips, known mostly for electronics and audio components, has developed a tabletop robot meant to serve as an intermediary device between the user and an array of electronic gadgets.

The so-called smart companion comes equipped with a battery-powered core technological system that includes speech recognition, speech synthesis, computer vision and face recognition. Named Dimi, the robot allows humans to make requests and interact with it in a natural way.

Accompanying software and a wireless or wired connection links Dimi up to a family's personal computer.

"Our technology focuses on the essential part of communication," said Harry Angenent, marketing and business development manager of the Home Dialogue Systems division at Philips.

Users can ask Dimi what the weather will be like tomorrow, and because it's connected to the Internet, it can search and report back on the results. Voice commands can also prompt the device to serve up electronic images, music or video stored on a computer's hard drive.

Although Dimi is capable of natural human dialogue, it does not look like your typical robot. It doesn't have arms, legs, a head, or even a face.

Instead, it's a series of stacked rectangular panels standing approximately 15 inches tall.

But the device has some anthropomorphic qualities.

It can speak and understand voice commands. It can photograph faces and recognize them later to address a familiar person. The top two panels pan and tilt to scan the room or to turn to address a person it is speaking to.

"People recognize the emotional aspect and personality behind it," said Angenent.

The fact that Dimi does not have physical human characteristics gives it some advantages, said Julie Carpenter, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, who studies how people interact and react to socially intelligent machines, especially humanoid robots.

According to Carpenter, some human-computer interaction theories suggest that people respond more favorably to robots that only vaguely appear human than to androids.

"Humanoid robots are not quiet fluid enough to be full humans, and so people get put off by that," she said.

Carpenter says that Philips's solution is a good intermediary step toward incorporating robots into the home.

"I don't think the general public is ready for an android sitting in their home talking to them," she said.

Philips will be looking to license Dimi to manufacturers and hopes to have the product on the market within the next year.