While task-oriented robot dialogues involve all these challenges, we should note that some potentially useful interactions with “talking” robots require little in the way of linguistic skills. For example, the Rubi robot described in (Movellan et al. 2009), displayed objects on its screen-equipped “chest” to toddlers, asking them to touch and name the objects. This resulted in improved word learning by the toddlers, despite the simplicity of the interaction. Another example of a very successful talking robot with no real linguistic skills was the “museum tour guide” Rhino (Burgard et al. 1999). Unlike Rubi it was able to navigate among unpredictably moving humans, and kept its audience engaged with its prerecorded messages and with a display of its current goals on a screen. In the same way, numerous humanoid robots (for example, Honda's Asimo) under past and present development across the world still understand very little language and rely mostly on scripted output. No doubt their utility and appeal will continue to grow, thanks to technologies like those mentioned above—games, companionable agent systems, voice-based apps, tutors, and so on; and these developments will also fuel progress on the deeper aspects of perception, motion, manipulation, and meaningful dialogue. 