Teaming up with Deutsche Bahn, Furhat created a multilingual concierge that's manning a desk at Germany's Frankfurt Airport. An employment agency in Sweden is preparing people for job interviews using Furhat, and, in a few schools in Stockholm, it's a teaching assistant. Rabobank in The Netherlands is using Furhat to train staff on how to have difficult, sensitive conversations like turning someone down for a loan. It can pretend to be angry or upset, placing the agent in a range of emotional scenarios. A recruitment firm is about to start conducting onboarding interviews through Furhat, removing any potential biases the human element might introduce.

Psychologists at Stockholm University are creating a robot personality that exhibits signs of depression to fill the training gap between reading books and actually coming across a depressed patient in a real clinical scenario. Furhat itself developed a character with early stage Alzheimer's that can be forgetful and repetitive to show the initial signs of dementia.

In a sense, the company and its partners are already showing how versatile the robot bust can be. The idea now is that you don't need to be a big firm or institution. Anyone can inquire about leasing or buying the hardware and develop their own.

Al Moubayed sees potential everywhere, particularly where people have already given way to interfaces. Instead of visiting a price comparison website, Furhat could be your new travel agent. Instead of tapping at a screen in McDonald's, Furhat could take your order -- and being aware of context means it will know to listen to the adult and not their kids calling for ice cream. It's a customer-service agent that never gets angry, bored, frustrated, hungry or tired. It could help you learn a language, conversing with you in real-time in a way a book can't. It could don a cartoon character's face and read your children a bedtime story or remind them to clean their rooms so you don't have to be the bad guy. From serious applications in healthcare to being a comical information point at a theme park, the applications are vast and varied.

Social robotics -- the notion that robots can connect with us on an emotional level as opposed to being machines designed for physical tasks -- is still in its infancy. Advancements in AI are starting to allow us to communicate more naturally with computers, but we're still figuring out where robots could fit into society. What forms they should take is an interesting question, too -- we know, for example, that it's much easier for us to form a bond with something that looks "cute." But if, in some theoretical future, you have to ask a robot receptionist at a hospital what room your loved one is in, you probably wouldn't find it appropriate if that receptionist looked like a cuddly bear.

We haven't found a great deal of solid use cases for social robots just yet, though simple companionship is one area in which they seem to be having a genuine impact. Japanese nursing homes have been using a social robot that resembles a seal pup for nearly 15 years, and there are clear signs companion robots can improve mental health. In the same vein, Toyota's Kirobo Mini companion robot is designed specifically to make casual conversation with drivers on long and lonely journeys. Otherwise, social robots like Pepper are being used as quirky, engaging teaching assistants for obvious reasons, and as half-novelty, half-functional guides, primarily in airports.

Kuri

Mayfield Robotics hoped to put social robots in homes with the Kuri, which wasn't really created with any specific purpose other than to become part of the family. It could read stories to kids, play with pets and take pictures of special moments, but Mayfield eventually decided it simply couldn't build a business from Kuri. Furhat doesn't really do anything -- it's not designed for a specific function, or limited by the ideas of a single company. Instead, it's a test bed for everyone with an idea for a social robot to work with.

But how ready we are to deal with human-like robots in everyday life? A recruitment agent might feel uncomfortable interviewing someone with autism, for example, but is that person going to be comfortable talking to a robot? Who's to say a robot is going to bring the best out in a candidate, and how prepared is a customer-service agent really going to be when the only credit card they've declined is one of a faux-angry floating face? Is it ethical to use conversational robots to keep lonely, elderly people company, and is an annoyed traveler going to be more or less frustrated if they have to talk to a robot for an update on their delayed flight?

Social robotics as a broad concept isn't dissimilar to self-driving cars, in a way. The promise is great; game-changing to a degree. But just as many people will never be comfortable handing the wheel over to a computer, so will others fundamentally reject the idea that a robot could ever understand us in the ways we understand each other.