The company that brought us the RoboSapian and RoboRaptor is coming out with a very, very different kind of robot: It's an intelligent media hub with facial recognition, text-to-speech and media management, and it can also serve as a surveillance unit for watching the baby and guarding your home. SCOTY (which stands for Smart Companion Operating Technology) is a 2-foot-tall, space-age-looking series of lighted panels; the top two can swivel. 

PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff was lucky enough to get a preview of SCOTY. Says Lance:

Built as part of a joint venture with Philips Electronics, SCOTY is many months from release. Still, the prototype we saw used its head-mounted video camera to recognize us, microphones on top of the uppermost panel to hear us, and speakers to greet us and respond to our commands... You'll be able to talk to SCOTY and have him play music from one of your networked PCs. In addition, SCOTY's software will allow it to tell you when you have new mail and even read it back to you.

I can't wait to try this one out. Read more of Lance's report here.