Mita Yun didn’t get into robotics to save the world. The lunar rovers she built as a student at Carnegie Mellon, and the software she developed as an engineer for Google—that stuff was just practice. The things Yun really wanted to make were friends.

Yun had hungered for companionship since she was a little girl in China. She’d begged her parents for a pet, but no dice. These were the days of China’s one-child policy, so no sibling either. Instead, Yun’s parents filled her room with a menagerie of stuffed animals, which she liked to imagine springing to life, their little paws dancing on her bedspread, their little bodies stuffed with possibilities.

In 2017, Yun quit her job at Google to start building the friend she’d always wanted. She started a company, called Zoetic, and recruited a few other roboticists to take her imaginary sidekick and turn it into a commercial product. Two years later, she's ready to introduce her creation: a small, interactive robot called Kiki, which goes on pre-sale later this month.

Kiki has pointed ears and a screen that projects big, puppyish eyes. It has a camera in its nose, to read your facial expressions, and it can perform little tricks to make you smile. If you pet it, Kiki sometimes cocks its head up or yelps in approval. In marketing materials, it's described as "a robot that touches your heart."

In Yun's dream world, everyone will have robopets like Kiki. Something like R2D2 from Star Wars or Baymax from Big Hero 6 or Marvin from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Really, she'd like to see the whole world come to life, enchanted by some combination of robotics and magic. “Imagine if, in our office, the trash can has a character or the printer has a character,” Yun says. “Imagine everything coming to life. That is the dream I have.”

Yun isn't the only one dreaming. Robotics startups are rolling out more and more companion bots, designed for the sole purpose of friendship. As these machines increasingly become part of domestic life, those relationships usher in ethical questions: Are those bonds healthy? Can they be exploited? Should an emotive robot be given to vulnerable populations—the elderly, the mentally ill? Should we raise our children beside robots? And how will we feel when our new friends, who we may grow to love, break down and die?

Yun's vision for a robot playmate began around the time she got her first Tamagotchi. The Japanese company Bandai had introduced the egg-shaped "digital pets" in 1996, and the product exploded in popularity, reaching markets around the world. (Yun regularly overfed hers. “I think I was a bad Tamagotchi parent,” she says.) Two years later, the American electronics company Tiger created the Furby. And a year after that, Sony debuted Aibo, a robotic dog the size of a chihuahua.

Aibo could do normal dog things, like bark and perform a few tricks. It could also do robot things, like capture photos with the camera in its nose. (Eventually it was able to send them straight to its owner's phone.) Unlike a real dog, Aibo didn't need to be fed or groomed, and it signaled its mood with a color-coded lighting system on its head (green: happy; orange: angry). Like a dog, it could be “trained,” through punitive or affectionate taps on the head.

It also sold extremely well. In the week following Aibo’s debut, Sony received more than 135,000 orders. (Sony, which had begun work on Aibo primarily as a research project to test its learnings in robotics, was not prepared. The company had made only 10,000 units for sale.)

Arielle Pardes covers personal technology and culture for WIRED.

The interest in Aibo established a market for products that functioned not just as toys or novelties but as real companions. So the electronics companies made more and more. Panasonic started work on a robotic cat. Tiger, the Furby-maker, introduced a discount Aibo called the Poo-Chi. It sold more than 10 million units in its first eight months.