Alpha 2 is a humanoid robot for your family home

We’ve been promised home robots since Rocky IV, but Alpha 2 finally looks like it could make good on our wishes.

It’s a lot smaller than Pauly’s robot, but much more advanced. It seems like more of a home helper, able to read out your emails, translate words when asked, and even remind you to give the dog his medicine. It can connect to the printer and fax machine – if anyone still has a fax machine – and control both at your whim.

If you’re heading out, it’ll give you a quick weather forecast before you go, and when you’re doing some DIY, it’ll read out instructions from the web. Though we don’t know how useful that will be without images and video to follow.

But it’s not all work. It can play music and dance, and recognise members of the family using facial recognition. (Though it does look worryingly like Terminator vision.) It can snap photos and post them to Facebook, and download apps to expand its skills.

Plus it can control your smart home appliances, so it can switch off your lights just by speaking.

Read more: Buddy is a home robot that will entertain your kids

To be honest, it looks a little too good to be true. Voice recognition has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, but we’ll believe this little ‘bot is this advanced when we see it.

But if it does work as advertised – a big if, admittedly – it could be awesome.

It’s raised almost $1 million and still has 23 days to go. You can nab one for $699 (£458), to ship in February.

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