“Hey, Kuri,” I say. “I love you.”

Pause. I brace for rejection, but then the robot lets out a balooop and shimmies back and forth. This, I am to presume, means Kuri loves me too.

Interacting with Kuri, a robot set to hit the market in December, is at once fascinating, delightful, and puzzling. Kuri's creators call it a "companion robot," but this is no Furby. Kuri belongs to a new class of machines that actually are intelligent, and actually make useful assistants at home. You can see them out in the wild, helping disabled people with routine daily tasks. Soon they'll remind the elderly to take their medication. Kuri's more of an all-purpose companion, a member of your family that also happens to play music and take video.

But the vanguard of increasingly intelligent machines invites questions about how people should interact with them. How do we build relationships with what is essentially a new kind of being? How do roboticists make it clear to people that the bond they form with a machine will never be as robust as a bond with a human? And how does the system keep bad actors from exploiting these bonds to, say, use these robot companions to squeeze money out of the elderly?

All big questions that society must start talking about, and now. Sure, no robot is in danger of forming a complex bond with its owner—not even Kuri. The technology just isn’t there yet. But the arrival of Kuri and other companion robots means that in the near future, you’ll need to pay very close attention to how robots make you feel. I mean, I just declared my love for one, for Pete’s sake.

Welcome to the Machines

For a robot without arms, Kuri’s got a lot going for it. You can teach it the layout of your house, then send it to the kitchen or living room to check on the kids. It can navigate bumps with surprising ease. It can play music on command. Using machine vision, it can recognize different members of the family, including pets, and automatically shoot video (a feature known as Kuri Vision). And if you suspect the dog is up on the couch again while you’re at work, you can remote-control Kuri to yell at it.

The really interesting bits about Kuri, though, are its subtleties, particularly when it comes to its interactions with humans. “It's the little things," says Mike Beebe, CEO of Mayfield Robotics, Kuri’s maker. "Sometimes like she blinks and she'll look around, or when she's about to turn she'll look first and then she'll turn. Doing that lets you understand what's kind of going on inside of Kuri.”

Since Kuri can’t speak—at least, not in what we’d identify as a human language—it communicates with clever cues. A beep means yes and a bloop means no, like a simplified version of whatever the hell R2-D2 speaks. This was an important consideration for Kuri’s designers, because if you want people to get along with companion robots, you have to set expectations for how much they can understand or do. “When something speaks back to you in fluent natural language, you expect at least a child's level of intelligence,” Beebe says. “That's a really wonderful thing, if it were possible. But right now robotics just isn't there yet. So setting that expectation right keeps it more understandable.”

"She helps you have meaningful relationships between your loved ones through her, but not with her." — Dor Skuler, CEO of Intuition Robotics

Another companion bot in development, ElliQ, approaches the challenges of human-robot interaction a bit differently. This desktop robot looks vaguely humanoid, with a big noggin that tilts and swivels as it speaks English. It’s meant for the elderly, periodically calling out to remind them to get some exercise or take their meds.

ElliQ works in concert with a tablet to both relay information and express it. If one of your relatives uploads a photo to Facebook, ElliQ will bring it up on the tablet, then turn toward the screen while speaking, in a way gesturing without hands. “We found that the separation between the content on the screen and the entity allows us to do a lot of interactions,” says Dor Skuler, CEO of Intuition Robotics, which developed ElliQ. “We also looked for an aesthetic which (a) we think is beautiful and (b) we think is not intimidating and allows us to earn a right at the home.”

Like Kuri, ElliQ must implicitly set expectations about what it can—and can't—do. These things don’t have agency and they certainly don’t have consciousness, but the human brain tends to project such things onto robots, especially adorable humanoid ones.