A family of souped-up answering machines, mechanical tomcats and servants wired to do our bidding is competing for a place in our homes.
In Japan, some of these robots are even threatening to rival flesh-and-blood family and pets as the country's rapidly greying society looks to technology for a helping hand and companionship.
At the forefront of robot technology since the 1970s, when manufacturers rushed to automate factory floors, Japan has no problems with machines taking over the living rooms. Technologists brought up on a fare of cute and helpful robots in the media are striking up robo friendships as more practical robots such as Aibo make it into the nation's, and the world's, homes.
Electronic pets are all very well, say the scientists, but we should develop more humanoid robots to help around the house.
Better mobility is just one reason. Even more important, say researchers at America's leading robotics laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is easier to interact with and control something human-like.
The robot would also find it easier to learn from us if we interacted with it on a normal level, says Professor Rodney Brooks of MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory.
"An important aspect of being human is interaction with other humans. For a human-level intelligent robot to gain experience in interacting with humans it needs a large number of interactions. If the robot has humanoid form then it will be both easy and natural for humans to interact with it in a human-like way."
Human-shaped androids have also proven in psychological tests in Japan that people are more likely to co-operate with a machine if they were, in a way, acquainted with it. We are more likely to warm to a human shape than other shapes.
Cue the winsome little droid PaPeRo - short for "partner-type personal robot". With a robot that can recognise you, switch on the TV and engage in small talk, its maker, NEC, seems to have made the electronic Jeeves a reality. The doll-like appearance has the cute, friendly demure look that the Japanese favour.
PaPeRo comes with a vocabulary of 3,000 phrases, recognises another 650, will respond when you call him, and can remember up to 10 different faces. Programmed to move around looking for human company, the little robot can also communicate expressively through its "eyes" - which also serve as cameras - and its mouth, which is made up of LEDs.
NEC sees the robot as providing home help for the dramatically increasing number of elderly, in particular. Not yet fully commercialised, PaPeRo should be a common feature in Japanese homes within two years, says NEC.
Meanwhile, if you can't wait for a fully mobile electronic companion, toy maker Tomy has just the thing: a £120 robot toy that can remember what you did last week and chat about it.
This particular robot, however, stays put. Tomy, the company behind Pokémon toys, has produced a mini cyber being with a vocabulary of the average Pokémon fan.
According to the company, Memoni is capable of memorising some 20,000 words, and is therefore theoretically able to form two billion sentences. What's more, it is able to respond to statements such as "I'm going for dinner tomorrow with so-and-so," with retorts such as: "Really, you took her to the same restaurant last time."
And as the robot remembers words from past events, it is also able to continue the conversation with remarks such as, "You were late for your last date with her, weren't you, so watch yourself," and so forth, Tomy said.
Memoni, who weighs in at 600 grams and stands 18 cm tall, "uses artificial intelligence to pick up relevant words within a conversation and can answer accordingly," says a Tomy spokesman. It homes in on two words in the conversation such as "date" and someone's name and makes an informed guess at what might be an appropriate retort. However, for the time being, Memoni can only converse in Japanese.
Initial training of the drone takes one week and it can also be used as a kind of secretary, as it keeps a diary and can remembers users' schedules.
Programmed to remember birthdays and meetings, Memoni is capable of greeting its user with a rendition of Happy Birthday on the appropriate morning and ask how yesterday's meeting went.
About to go on sale this summer in Japan, Memoni joins a growing band of intelligent electronic companions, including its English-speaking stablemate Dog.com -the latest Aibo rival - to be launched in the UK this May by Tomy.
Derided by scientists in the past as idle imagining, androids (or humanoids, to use the preferred robotics term) are now springing to life in labs across the world. From fiction to reality, the circle of the android/ humanoid tale, it seems, is nearing completion.
