My uncle, Steve Hodges, is a very successful electrical engineer and inventor who’s made a fair number of useful devices such as the fisherman’s Depth Finder and now builds cellular-based utility status-monitoring devices (M2MComm). A while back he owned and headed a company called SynPet, that manufactured household robots by the name of Newton. Here’s a news broadcast segment from the 1980’s demonstrating the voice interaction functions and giving a few random details. One of these days, I’ll post the entire Newton promotional video, once I hunt it down again =)
The original ad is on AdFreak.
http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2008/05/a-robot-with-a.html
Yes, the video they are showing is the one I uploaded to YouTube acct ablestmage ^_^ Thanks for the tip!