Courtesy Aibo-life.org

Aibo's having a great time at our place. Jenn has accepted having the thing around and the kids LOVE it. I am trying to find time to enjoy it, although I think the cold and rainy days are going to be the only time I get to Aibo (who has now accepted the name "Gearbox").

The Aibos (from what I've seen) are cool enough but aren't really intelligent - you just program them by making changes to a standard memory stick (a proprietary type of RAM that Sony has come up with). There does seem to be an amount of randomness - they don't always respond to voice commands. I have found that I can view the results of Gearbox's "learning" through some shareware software and a memory stick reader.

I'm still very impressed with what Sony has been able to do with such a small unit. Having enough sensors and input to locomote and do simple voice recognition is pretty spectacular. I know that I'll enjoy learning about robotics as I play with Gearbox more and more.