Sony will next month introduce a second humanoid alternative to its popular Aibo 'entertainment' robot. The SDR-4X II improves on the previous model, introduced last year, by offering better movement, safety and conversational capabilities. So it is better able to recover from motion that might or already has upset its balance, and if it falls it can adopt a pose that minimises the risk of damage. It has a new processor that can recognise continuous speech and is backed by a 20,000-word vocabulary.
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