Pick up the phone?

On September 29 in 1950 - Bell Laboratories and Western Electric created the first telephone answering machine ... and look how far we've come since then. A piece in Icon in today's Sydney Morning Herald offers the services of "the Squirrel" - a "cutely intelligent robot which detects when you want to want to want to answer your phone by your body language". Its creator Stefan Marti was interested in a mix of psychology and technology - and the squirrel is a combination of the two. To find out more you can visit the cellular squirrel site. Hopefully there's a link from there to his work on the prototype - a shoulder-mounted parrot.
NB - funny the things you notice: I picked up the pic accompanying this story from the SMH site - and realised it seems they'd picked it up - and cropped it to remove the copyright material - from the Cellular Squirrel site - where, with ears and a full tail, it actually does look more like a squirrel!